The occasion of the action was an address by Charles Reed, chancellor of the California State University (CSU) system, before a meeting of the American Council of Education. The event was held at the Marriott, a hotel that has refused to bargain with Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 2. Hotel workers voted in the union in 1996 and still have no contract. HERE cosponsored the rally with the CFA. Rally participants carried signs that read "Stop the rip-offs!

The CFA represents 22,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches on the 22 campuses of the state university system. California state schools enroll more than 370,000 full and part-time students.

CFA president Susan Meisenhelder, an English professor at Cal State San Bernadino, said in a press release, "We find it distressingly characteristic that Charles Reed will be speaking at a nonunion hotel, site of the longest-running labor dispute in San Francisco. This is all of a piece with his disrespect for faculty, his anti-working family attitude, and his seeming disregard for the quality of education of students."

The CFA has requested a strike authorization vote this spring because of stalled contract negotiations. The CFA's contract with the CSU expired last July, and talks are at a formal impasse. Faculty members are seeking a 6.3 percent wage increase, but state legislators have only budgeted 2 percent.

Besides demanding adequate wage increases for faculty members at CSU, the CFA is fighting against the growing practice of the state system to hire faculty on a temporary basis. These lecturers are denied many of the rights that tenure-track faculty have and are "underpaid and overworked," an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle noted.

The CFA organized teach-ins on their campuses last October in order to get support from their students. Eleven students from the Cal State San Diego MECHA chapter attended the rally; more than 60 students from Sonoma came as well. Joel Flores, a student at Cal State Long Beach who came with 15 students and five teachers, told the Militant, "If the teachers don't get a fair contract, the students won't get the education we need." Flores said that about 50 CSU students met last week to organize support for the strike.

Also attending the rally were 15 locked out United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) members from the Charles Krug winery in Napa, who distributed leaflets about their fight and lead the crowd in chanting "Si se puede!"

Bill Kalman is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 120 in San Lorenzo, California.  
 
 
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