Help me organize a statewide DSA presence in the impending CSU strikes this fall
“For every $1 California invests in the CSU [California State University], $6.98 of industry activity is generated. When alumni are factored in, the ratio rises to $29.90 of industry activity.”
This is a slice of juicy marketing language on the CSU’s website. It works on me! I’m willing to reveal—to the entire CA DSA readership—that I felt a sincere moment of pride for my employer when I read it. I felt enough pride that it motivated the compulsion to fact check the claim, to fact check… my pride. (And then I thought the quote may imply something grave related to the labor theory of value???.)
But I’m not going to fact check it. I’m writing to convince you to help me go on strike with CSUEU—the CSU Employee Union—this fall. I’m a CSUEU member, a CA-DSA delegate from LA, and an admin assistant at a Cal State campus.
Whether or not it is true that the CSUs executive management has a turn-1-dollar-into-29-dollars-and-90-cents machine, it is true that the CSU’s three largest unions—mine, the California Faculty Association, and the Teamsters—are all publicly threatening to strike if conditions at their bargaining tables don’t change.
For my union, those conditions have a kinda boring keyword: “salary schedule.” Pretty much every single public employee in the state of California has one, but CSUEU members don’t. It is a pretty basic idea: if you do a good job, or get more education, every three years or so you’ll advance to the next “step” on the salary schedule, and we’ll pay you more. Good performance yields higher pay, guaranteed.
I think my work is dignified. It’s immensely applicable to the efforts I find myself engaged in as both a union organizer and DSA member. I also embrace that I am doing more or less the same job as the person in the admissions office at UC Berkeley, the person at the front desk of the principal’s office at the high school I went to, or the person who does the calendar for the president of the community college 4 miles from my apartment.
My job became very different from those other jobs in 1996 (I was 4 😎), when the CSU tore up my union’s salary schedule during an impasse in contract negotiations. Since then, tens of thousands of steady, benefits-rich, and dare I say dignified jobs have transformed into something that yields a paycheck-to-paycheck existence.
Even though I will often dress up this concept with more romance when I talk to coworkers about it, a salary schedule is not a shining beacon of Super Charged Extra Cool Marxist Purity. It’s something the CSU should provide to its employees as a basic guarantee that our jobs will keep up with rising costs of living. CSUEU represents a wide swath of workers in addition to admin assistants: custodians, groundsworkers, irrigation specialists, gardeners, laborers, cooks, food service workers, warehouse workers, IT workers, medical staff. In all of these work areas, we can observe that we’re austerity-ing our way toward poverty and pain, and the lack of a salary schedule is to blame.
We’re likely to strike in the fall because we’re never getting salary steps at the table, so my proposal to you is as follows: in the next few months, help me make connections between DSA members and union members/organizers at as many of the CSUs as possible. I’m aiming to develop these relationships so DSA can help coordinate strike support efforts at CSU pickets (i.e. bringing food, signs, sunscreen, etc.). If you’re interested in pitching in, fill out this form. Solidarity.