Faculty of America’s largest public university system begin weeklong strike
Faculty at California State University, America’s largest public university system, began a historic weeklong strike on Monday as more than 30,000 workers walked off their jobs.
Professors, librarians, plumbers, electricians and other workers demanding higher pay and improved working conditions are striking. The five-day faculty work stoppage is the first to take place systemwide across Cal State’s 23 campuses.
The walkout comes two weeks after CSU officials ended contract negotiations with a unilateral offer of a 5% pay raise effective 31 January, far below the 12% hike that the union, the California Faculty Association, is seeking. California is one of the most expensive places to live in the US and pay has not kept up with the rising costs, faculty say.
“CSU management wants to maintain the status quo, which is not working for the vast majority of our faculty, students and staff,” Chris Cox, the CFA vice-president of racial & social justice, north, and a lecturer at San José State University, said in a statement. “In order for us to have a properly functioning system in years to come, we need to improve the working conditions for faculty and learning conditions for students.”
With the new semester beginning on Monday, classes for many of the system’s 450,000 students could be cancelled, unless faculty members individually decide to cross picket lines.
The CFA represents roughly 29,000 workers. They were joined on the picket lines by 1,100 CSU skilled trades workers represented by the Teamsters Local 2010, which has also not yet reached a new contract with the university.
Mildred Garcia, the Cal State chancellor, said on Friday in a video call with journalists that the university system had sought to avoid a strike but the union’s salary demands are simply not viable.
“We must work within our financial reality,” she said.
In December, CFA members staged one-day walkouts on four campuses in Los Angeles, Pomona, Sacramento and San Francisco to press for higher pay, more manageable workloads and increased parental leave. The CFA has also sought gender inclusive restrooms and changing rooms and more counselors for students but says management has ignored nearly all its demands.
The union says the university has money in its “flush reserve accounts” and could afford the salary increases with funds from operating cash surpluses and the $766m CSU has in emergency reserves.
“Our proposals are reasonable and absolutely necessary,” Dr Rong Chen, a CSU San Bernardino professor emeritus and CFA-San Bernardino president, said in a statement.
“We also know that the university has the money to fund them – if only it would get its priorities straight,” he added, pointing to the CSU reserves, recent raises for university presidents and the chancellors’s nearly $1m compensation package.
Leora Freedman, CSU’s vice-chancellor for human resources, said reserve funds cannot be tapped for wage hikes because they are meant for times of economic uncertainty or emergencies, including wildfires or earthquakes.
“We’ve made several offers with movement, and most recently a 15% increase that would be paid over three years, providing faculty a 5% increase each year. But the faculty union has never moved off its 12% demand for one year only,” she said.
The increase the union is seeking would cost the system $380m in new recurring spending, which the university can’t afford, Freedman said.
The university strike comes after a major year for the US labor movement. Last year, healthcare professionals, Hollywood actors and writers and auto workers staged high profile strikes as they picketed for better pay and working conditions.
In 2022, teaching assistants and graduate student workers in the University of California System went on strike for a month.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
retail partnerships with the eyewear brand in several locations, Macy’s had no connection to this robbery as the Sunglass Hut in question is a standalone location, he said.
“We feel very comfortable saying facial recognition software is the only possible explanation, and it’s the only reason why [Sunglass Hut] would go to Macy’s to try to identify him,” Dutko said.
Murphy’s case would be the seventh known case of a wrongful arrest due to facial recognition in the US, further highlighting the flaws of a technology already widely adopted by police departments and retailers. However, in all of the publicly known cases of wrongful arrests due to facial recognition up until now, the victims have been Black. Murphy’s would be the first known case of the failure of the technology leading to the wrongful arrest of a white man. Just last month, Rite Aid settled with the Federal Trade Commission over its use of a facial recognition system that misidentified Black, Latino and Asian customers as people previously identified as “likely to engage” in shoplifting. The pharmacy chain is forbidden from using facial recognition in its stores for five years as part of the settlement. And in the summer of 2023, a woman named Porcha Woodruff was arrested on charges of car jacking due to false identification by a facial recognition system.
Macy’s has previously been sued over its use of facial recognition technology. In a 2020 lawsuit, a Chicago woman accused the company of working with facial recognition provider Clearview AI without her or other customers’ consent in violation of Illinois’ biometric privacy law.
Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the America Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project said this was another example of the “extreme dangers of face recognition technology”.
“In case after case, we’ve seen police reflexively trusting unreliable face recognition results, and then allowing false matches from the technology to taint witness identification procedures,” Wessler said in a statement. “As the facts alleged in this case show, the consequences of being wrongfully arrested are horrible. Lawmakers must put a stop to police and corporations’ hazardous reliance on face recognition results to put people in jail.”
Murphy is seeking $10m in damages.
Macy’s said it had no comment on pending litigationand EssilorLuxottica did not immediately respond to a Guardian request for comment.