California Faculty Consider Marching

Faculty for Cal State schools throughout California will begin voting today to determine whether to walk off the job over grievances regarding pay, class size, and health care.  If approved by a simple majority, faculty would begin a series of rolling two-day walkouts statewide.  The voting process will last into next week with the results announced soon afterwards.

The California Faculty Association website offers all sorts of resources to further understand the history of this issue.  Included is a full rundown of the 20 months of bargaining between the CFA and the State, including lots of neat graphs, tables and statistics (which I know we all love).  Of particular interest to me was the graph showing that it's actually more lucrative to teach at community college than in the CSU system.

This comes at a time of exciting union activity throughout the California college and university system.  John Edwards appeared in Berkeley on Sunday and waxed poetic about the UC Berkeley janitors, saying, "This march for economic and social justice for the men and women who work at this university is a part of a bigger march in America for fairness and equality."

Covered at Surf Putah and cross posted here at Calitics last week, the Associated Students of UC Davis have voted to support the unionizing efforts of Sodexho employees on campus.

With the Employee Free Choice Act passing the House last week, big things are happening.  Via the link we learn that "one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign ... [and] 60 million U.S. workers say they would join a union if they could."  The link also comes complete with YouTube action from California's own George Miller.

Change is coming in a big way to the California education system.  Underpaid workers at the highest levels is just one aspect that's coming to a head right now.  At the local and state level, the fight over how the educational system is going to operate is being waged.  The battle today is how we'll treat the people who deliver knowledge.