Possibility of another strike opens
By Kenna Jenkins, September 8, 2026
The California Faculty Association and the California State University system reached an impasse in negotiations over faculty salaries, workload, sick leave, health care and sabbaticals according to CFA.
For salary benefits, the CFA proposed a minimum salary of $79,500 and an annual cost-of-living adjustment, which is a raise tied to the annual inflation rate plus 2%. Other proposals include protections for using or refusing to use artificial intelligence, course caps to stop over-enrollment and tenure-track faculty not teaching more than three courses per semester.
“The main proposals have to do with salary, with workload and then we’re also proposing some new articles about AI and also academic freedom,” said CFA Pomona President Bonnie Thorne.
The CFA includes all 23 CSU campuses and has more than 29,000 members made up of tenured, tenure-track, lecturer, counselor, librarian and coaching faculty. It’s negotiating further protections for counseling, librarian and coaching faculty as well, including counselors’ direct services not exceedingly more than 65% of their workload, according to the CFA website.
“In some ways it’s surprising that the chancellor (Mildred García) doesn’t want to work for the benefit of all of us, but I don’t think that she cares about students or faculty,” Thorne said. “She’s (García) not on the bargaining team but they do her bidding and so they have dragged out bargaining.”
According to the CSU website García has been the CSU Chancellor since October 2023.
The CFA and CSU system began bargaining over the full contract in November 2025. Every collective bargaining agreement the CFA makes with the CSU system lasts three years, with the previous agreement starting in 2022 and ending in 2025.
“When the existing contract runs out, we try to negotiate a new contract before that happens, but when that fails, we get extensions,” said Marc Scarcelli, CFA Pomona’s communication committee chair. “We’ve actually had six extensions at this point, so it’s been a long process.”
According to Scarcelli and the CFA’s website, the CSU system rejected the CFA’s proposed salary increase and instead offered a taxable, one-time 3% lump sum for 2025-2026. It also denied every proposal related to faculty workload and improvement to job protections for faculty.
“That’s an important difference,” Scarcelli said. “Because 3% is lower than 3.5, but more importantly since it’s not a raise, it doesn’t raise the baseline salary, so any subsequent raise doesn’t build on that. Their current offer is you can have a one-time payment for last year, not a raise, and then a 3% raise for this year, well, that would put us significantly behind the rate of inflation.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the consumer price index, which is the measure of prices paid by urban consumer, rose 3.4% between July 2025-26.
Thorne said the CFA bargaining team decided that negotiations weren’t going anywhere, a decision the Chancellor’s Office disagreed with, but the Public Employment Relations Board overruled the Chancellor’s office which led to the current impasse in the bargaining process. The PERB is responsible for providing the statuses during the collective bargaining process.
According to Thorne, the next step is a confidential mediation process that includes faculty representatives from every CSU campus as well as the Chancellor’s office.
If a solution can’t be found during that period, Thorne said they move onto fact finding where one representative from the CFA and one from the Chancellor’s Office present information supporting their stance on the CBA terms to a PERB appointed mediator.
From there, Thorne said a report is issued which then has a 10-day blackout period before it can be released to the public, giving both sides another opportunity to negotiate based on the report’s findings and recommendations. After the blackout, faculty are legally allowed to strike.
The CFA is also pushing back against groups like The Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank founded in the state of Washington that actively sends mailers to union members encouraging them to quit the union.
Fake checks and holidays cards are sent to union members year-round, Scarcelli said, which lists how much The Freedom Foundation thinks faculty could save by leaving the union.
“I’m not at all swayed by their point regarding saving any money,” Scarcelli said. “Union dues are 1.35% for faculty, and since that got us a 10% raise last time, instead of 3% or less. If not for the union, that’s obviously more than worth it. “
Scarcelli said students also benefit from having unionized teachers because “faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.”
Alejandra Padilla, a political science student who started at CPP during fall semester 2024, missed the CFA strike earlier that year, but she said she was devastated to hear about faculty conditions after seeing the strike mentioned in one of her syllabi.
“I put them on the same pedestal as a doctor,” Padilla said. “I need them. We need them. They’re necessary. They really keep society together in a way because they educate us.”
Kayla Randolph, who interns for Student for Quality Education which is the student branch of the CFA, said students can support faculty by staying up to date with negotiations and make sure they are aware of their professors’ plans for their class if a strike were to occur.
“Just by staying informed and getting involved with student issues and raising your voice about those things you are supporting and uplifting faculty thing as well,” Randolph said, “because they are way more connected than people think.”
According to Randolph, students in the SQE supported faculty in the previous CFA strike in 2024 by informing students about what faculty members were asking for, making poster boards for picketing and creating “hype” for the strikes on their social media.
Randolph said it’s important to her that students remember that there would not be a university without students and the money they pay to attend it, and that faculty and student solidarity are important.
“None of us (faculty) want to go on strike,” said Thorne, who’s been teaching at Cal Poly Pomona for over 20 years. “We want to get a good contract. If we go on strike classes won’t be held and we would like to be doing our jobs in the classes with students.”
Feature image courtesy of CFA Pomona
