With the help of its third White Paper release Tuesday, the California Faculty Association intends to request a salary increase for part-time faculty in May.
The most recent white paper, titled “Race to the Bottom: Losing Ground and Losing Faith,” surveyed 5,500 CFA members and asked about their standards of living and increasing wage gaps.
“We have found that faculty salaries are dropping and it is hard to call teaching in the CSU a middle class job any longer,” Lillian Taiz, a history professor at California State University, Los Angeles and the president of the CFA, said during a media conference call.
“Race to the Bottom: Losing Ground and Losing Faith” focuses on personal accounts of faculty members and their financial struggles.
This included a highlight of a member of CSULB’s faculty, Althea Waiters, who lectures part time for the music department.
“If you’re teaching part-time, as I have been for all these years, there’s no way that I could live off of the retirement the university would pay me,” Waiters said in the white paper.
Part-time faculty who teach for more than two semesters are eligible for California Public Employment Retirement System, according to media coordinator for the CSU administration Laurie Weidner
A key focus of the white paper is the effect of the university system in relying more on part-time faculty and their difficulty in reaching tenured employment.
According to Taiz , the number of full-time faculty in the CSU system has declined by 30 percent while increasing the number of part-time faculty by 46 percent.
In response to the claims laid out in the white papers, the CSU sent out fact sheets of its own explaining its side of the story.
“The CFA’s claims about the university’s investment in faculty and its impact on students are not only misleading, they are being made because the union is attempting to enhance its position in salary negotiations starting in May,” a CSU press release stated Tuesday.
Weidner said that despite the information that the CFA is publishing in their white papers series, the CSU’s are compensating them fairly.
“Lecturers earn an hourly wage that is higher than the national average for like positions,” Weidner said. “Our salaries are competitive.”
CSU hired 740 tenure track faculty in 2014, which is more than twice the number from the year before, according to the CSU administration. This amounts to a net gain of 124 members after factoring in faculty that retired or left for better paying jobs, Taiz said.
“You would have to hire far more than [740] faculty to begin to make a tiniest bit of difference in reversing the trend that has been built for years,” Taiz said.
The release of the part of the white paper happened in coordination with a rally held by the CFA at the steps of the Capitol Building in Sacramento to lobby state legislatures.
Domingo-Foraste said that as many as 130 CSU faculty and students came to the rally, and were addressed by state assembly members Jose Medina and Miguel Santiago.
The next white paper will be released in May, around the same time that the CFA intends to negotiate for new contracts. The CFA will be asking for additional funds of $215 million from the state, Domingo-Foraste said.