Student-Worker Strike Repercussions - Part 13 (CSU spillover)

What happened at UC did not go unnoticed at CSU. From the LA Times yesterday:

Cameron Macedonio clocks 30 to 40 hours each week running Cal State Fullerton’s campus radio station, Titan Radio. As general manager, he oversees a 12-person staff and dozens of disc jockeys for the 24-hour broadcast, at a salary of $15.50 an hour. But the Cal State system only allows students to work 20 hours a week — so Macedonio doesn’t get compensated for much of the time he puts in. “I’m pretty much on call at all times for the station,” said Macedonio, 20, a rising fourth-year journalism major.

Expanding students’ work hours is one issue, in addition to higher salaries and paid sick leave, that Macedonio hopes to address by forming a union. He is among more than 4,000 student assistants across CSU’s 23 campuses, working in jobs from IT support to receptionist, who submitted paperwork in April seeking to hold a vote on whether to unionize. If the campaign is successful, the union would be the largest representing nonacademic undergraduate student employees in the country, according to the Cal State University Employees Union, which hopes to add the students to the more than 15,000 support staff already on its membership rolls.

For student workers, campus jobs are a lifeline that provides critical income. Faced with soaring costs for housing, groceries and other necessities, some students have been forced to supplement those jobs with other gigs off campus.

The unionization push at Cal State follows other labor uprisings led by low-paid workers in education. Tens of thousands of academic workers at the University of California won wage increases and improved benefits after walking off the job for six weeks last year. In March, support staff won similar concessions from the Los Angeles Unified School District after a three-day strike...

“It was just the solidarity of so many people across all of California,” said Grayce Honsa, a political science and women’s studies major at San Diego State University. “If the UC students can do it, then why can’t we?”

It often doesn’t take much to convince student workers to unionize, they said — “It’s overall not feeling supported by CSU as a system.” ...

Over the next several months, the California Public Employment Relations Board will determine whether union organizers fulfilled the requirement that at least 30% of eligible workers signed cards requesting a unionization vote.

Cal State employed about 19,500 student assistants in March, a university spokesperson told The Times. That would bring the 30% threshold to 5,850, leaving the organizers short with their roughly 4,000 signatures.

The organizers said the university had not shared staffing figures until recently, making the campaign more difficult. The positions the university included on its list of eligible workers will be a point of contention going forward.

Cal State officials have the power to bypass the process and voluntarily allow a vote but have thus far signaled no intent to do so.

Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) and Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) have written to interim CSU Chancellor Jolene Koester and Wenda Fong, chair of the system’s board of trustees, urging them to “quickly enter into an election agreement.” ...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-03/campus-jobs-are-a-lifeline-for-these-csu-students-heres-why-they-want-to-unionize.