September 2, 2020

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

On behalf of your local chapter Executive Board (E-Board) of the California Faculty Association (CFA), Los Angeles, we welcome you to the start of Fall 2020. Welcome to all the new faculty joining us this year! Congratulations to those of you who received retention, tenure, promotion, or range elevation beginning this term!

Our 2020-2021 campaign is: “Fighting for Rights, Respect, and Justice.” We are going on the offensive in the fight for rights, respect, and justice. Although we are in a virtual environment, we are ramping up for a very active year. There will be a number of opportunities for you to get involved and be a part of our growing and thriving union.

Below you will find several key updates as well as a few organizing priorities you can look forward to this semester. We understand that this welcome address is rather long, but there is a lot of important information that we want to share with you. We are also still in the planning stage for most of our activities this term, so stay tuned for more details to follow.

CFA-LA Efforts during Summer 2020

Overall, this has been a long and challenging summer for the E-Board, and much of our chapter work has been coordinating with our statewide leadership and campus administration. We held almost weekly Labor-Management meetings with the former Provost and AVP for Faculty Affairs between late March and late June. During these meetings, we made some progress on several issues related to COVID-19 and the transition to remote instruction, such as adjustments to RTP procedures, clarification around the order of assignment (Article 12.29), and ensuring up to $2,000 compensation for faculty who completed the CETL Alt-Instruction Summer Institute Training.

On many other very important issues, however, we received either unclear or unsatisfactory responses from administrators. For instance, they provided no transparency about how our campus spent the $38 million in CARES Act funding, other than the first ½ being used for direct student aid. They refused to reduce class sizes for pedagogical and student support purposes, even though we presented them with a petition signed by 713 faculty members. Finally, despite numerous attempts to convince management not to cancel classes in the middle of the global pandemic, they nevertheless cut courses resulting in students having to scramble for other courses at the last minute, and the loss of income and healthcare for dozens of Lecturer faculty.

#NoCourseCuts Campaign

While we didn’t concentrate our challenge to these cuts solely to the bargaining table, organizing during the summer amid COVID-19 has proven to be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, we called a virtual Emergency Townhall Meeting on July 16, 2020, attended by over 150 faculty and students. At this meeting, an ad hoc committee of rank-and-file faculty and students worked with members of the CFA-LA E-Board to develop a media campaign and toolkit under the slogans #CutCovidNotClasses,  #NoCourseCuts, and #ChopFromTheTop. The campaign included the curation of dozens of Lecturer testimonials on social media and a virtual press conference, attended by reporters from CBS/KCAL, KTLA, The LA Times, and KNX Radio. The summer iteration of the campaign concluded with a Convocation Caravan and Car Rally held at Cal State LA on August 20, 2020. However, we continue to uplift the demand that upper management voluntarily take 10% pay cuts rather than further reduce class offerings that will negatively impact students, faculty, and the overall quality of education.

Fighting Decentralized Austerity

To be clear, campus management has used the cover of COVID-19 to impose “decentralized austerity.” While neoliberalism usually ushers in austerity in top-down, one-size-fits-all types of cutbacks, management at Cal State LA has implemented cuts that are diffuse and increasingly difficult to oppose. Instead of openly laying off thousands of faculty members as happened at CUNY and elsewhere, CSU administrators downsized the faculty in smaller clusters by shrinking funding allocations to departments/programs, non-reappointment of Lecturers, raising student-to-faculty ratios, canceling so-called “low enrolled” courses, and increasing course caps. Cumulatively, decentralized austerity has the same outcome as draconian mass layoffs and budget cuts, except that it takes more time and effort to gather details about what’s transpiring, which makes challenging it a lot more complicated.

At the same time that management reduced the faculty, they also admitted more students than there was available space for in classes, resulting in thousands of students on waitlists. Rather than opening new sections to meet the student demand, managers have been pressuring faculty to increase course caps to accommodate the waitlisted students. We recently have drafted a petition encouraging faculty to refuse workload increases and instead demand that campus management use CARES Act funding or other campus reserves to open additional sections. Also, you likely received an email from Molly Talcott, CFA-LA Faculty Rights chair, announcing a chapter grievance related to course cap increases we are in the process of filing. If you’ve felt pressured to accept, or even consider, adding students above your course cap, we urge you to contact our Faculty Rights team immediately (facrightschair.la@calfac.org).

Anti-racism and Social Justice Unionism

CFA’s commitment to anti-racism and social justice unionism propels our support for Black Lives Matter and AB1460. As you know, this summer commenced with the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police captured on Facebook Live and culminated the day before classes started when a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake seven-times in the back paralyzing him from the waist down. The continued propagation of anti-Black state-sanctioned violence by law enforcement has only exacerbated the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying economic crisis. Our E-Board drafted a statement this summer condemning the police killings of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Toni McDade, and other Black people. We also demanded that Cal State LA management redirect resources it spends on policing to hire additional tenure-track mental health counselors and establish trauma-informed crisis intervention teams.

AB1460 CSU: Ethnic Studies Graduation Requirement

Thanks in large part to the efforts of CFA organizers—in particular, CFA-LA Council for Social and Racial Justice chair Melina Abdullah (Pan-African Studies)—who worked alongside student activists, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB1460 (CSU: Ethnic Studies Graduation Requirement). Over the past several months, we saw an incredible amount of momentum from activists from around the state. Our ability to rally in solidarity to support Ethnic Studies has resulted in a monumental win for the CSU, the state of California, and every future CSU student. CFA co-sponsored the ethnic studies bill that will now require the CSU to provide courses in ethnic studies at each of its 23 campuses and require students to complete one ethnic studies course to graduate. We recognize the value of and the empowerment that comes from students learning the histories, cultures, and intellectual traditions/contributions of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other people of color, along with the importance of deepening our students’ understanding of the intersections of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and other aspects of our social location when it comes to analyzing power and institutional structures.

AY 2020-21: Looking Ahead

As the E-Board looks ahead, we have already begun strategizing the best ways to approach our specific challenges this academic year. We are currently taking a multi-pronged approach and focusing our energies on the following areas to help defend our faculty, students, and campus community from further harm caused by budget cuts and COVID-19:

Continue to fight the imposition of decentralized austerity (budget cuts):

We will escalate the campaign initiated this summer to demand more accountability from campus management around the use of CARES Act funding and to protect the jobs and working conditions of the faculty. As we mentioned above, we will use the chapter grievance process to challenge increased course caps and administrative attempts to expand our already excessive workloads. We have already heard from several chairs that additional budget cuts are being planned for the spring, which will surely make matters worse. Therefore, the only way for us to challenge decentralized austerity is if more faculty join this fight for rights, respect, and justice. #CARESActTransparency > #CutCovidNotClasses >#ChopFromTheTop

Ensure that our faculty understand COVID-19-related leave programs:

We announced in previous emails this summer about the two COVID-19-related leave programs available to faculty: Coronavirus Paid Administrative Leave (CPAL) and Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) leave. These programs are designed to accommodate both medical and childcare issues and a number of faculty have already been approved for timebase reductions and leaves.

Other chapter organizing priorities:

a. Protect the health and safety of faculty, students, and other campus workers: ensure an equitable and just reopening of campus.

b. Ensure that any faculty member who lost employment is able to maintain their health coverage during the pandemic.

c. Demand reimbursement for employee-incurred expenses (WiFi, laptop, printing, etc.).

d. Prepare for the upcoming contract campaign in June 2021.

e. Continue to fight anti-Blackness at Cal State LA and ensure more campus resources are redirected from policing to support Black, Indigenous, and other students of color.

f. Build a university-wide Labor Council with the other campus unions.

We will need all hands on deck in order to secure these organizing priorities. As the semester progresses, please be assured that your CFA-LA chapter leadership intends to work closely with shared governance leaders (Academic Senate), student groups, other bargaining units on campus, and, when possible, Faculty Affairs, to create and negotiate more strategies and organizing options to meet all the concerns we are currently facing. There is undoubtedly much to respond to and deal with right now. Again, thank you for all you do and for supporting CFA-LA. We promise to fight as hard as we can for, and with, everyone to build a better future.To find your CFA Department Representative you can use the link below. If you don’t see a CFA Rep for your department, consider becoming one! Just let us know you are interested, and we’ll get you connected: https://www.calfac.org/csula-department-representatives.

In Solidarity,

Anthony

On behalf of the Executive Board of the California Faculty Association, Cal State LA Chapter

Anthony Ratcliff, Ph.D.

Chapter President

California Faculty Association-Los Angeles