CSU faculty strike over raises slows campuses

11/18/ 2011.
HAYWARD — Hundreds of California State University faculty members staged a strike Thursday at two campuses over raises the professors said they are owed.
The California Faculty Association, which represents CSU professors, lecturers, coaches, counselors and librarians at the system's 23 campuses, organized the walkout at Cal State-East Bay in Hayward and Cal State-Dominguez Hills in Carson.

It was the first faculty strike since systemwide collective bargaining began in the 1980s.

Faculty members at each campus were joined by hundreds of their colleagues from other CSU schools.

Susan Green, president of the union's Chico State University chapter, said about 40 people took a chartered bus from Chico so they could participate in the strike.

In a phone interview Thursday afternoon, she said the strike closed the campus.

"We absolutely shut down the (Hayward) campus. It's a ghost town," she said late Thursday afternoon.

However, Erik Fallis, a spokesman for the CSU who was at the campus, said he saw students going about their business wherever he went on campus during the day.

At the East Bay campus, faculty members picketed at the school's two main entrances, slowing traffic into campus and urging motorists to support the strike. They blew whistles, beat drums and chanted, "Don't cross the line. Faculty members on strike."