WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court handed organized labor a major victory on Tuesday, deadlocking 4 to 4 in a case that had threatened to cripple the ability of public-sector unions to collect fees from workers who chose not to join and did not want to pay for the unions’ collective bargaining activities.
It was the starkest illustration yet of how the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia last month has blocked the power of the court’s four remaining conservatives to move the law to the right.
A ruling allowing workers to refuse to pay the fees would have been the culmination of a decades-long campaign by a group of prominent conservative foundations aimed at weakening unions that represent teachers and other public employees. Tuesday’s deadlock denied them that victory, but it set no precedent and left the door open for further challenges once the Supreme Court is back at full strength.
When the case was argued in January, the court’s conservative majority seemed ready to say that forcing public workers to support unions they had declined to join violates the First Amendment. Justice Scalia’s questions were consistently hostile to the unions.
His death changed the balance of power in this case, and most likely in many others. The clout of the court’s four-member liberal wing has increased significantly. Its members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — can create deadlocks, as they did Tuesday, and they can sometimes attract the vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy for a liberal result.
Should Senate Republicans relent and confirm Judge Merrick B. Garland as Justice Scalia’s replacement, the power of the court’s liberals might only grow.
Union officials said they were elated by Tuesday’s decision, but they remain wary of future efforts to diminish their effectiveness.

“We know the wealthy extremists who pushed this case want to limit the ability for workers to have a voice, curb voting rights and restrict opportunities for women and immigrants,” said Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union.
The case was brought by the Center for Individual Rights, a libertarian group that pursued an unusual litigation strategy. Responding to signals from the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices, the group asked the lower courts to rule against its clients, 10 teachers and a Christian education group, so they could file an appeal in the Supreme Court as soon as possible.
Terence J. Pell, the group’s president, said he was disappointed with Tuesday’s tie vote.
“With the death of Justice Scalia, this outcome was not unexpected,” he said. “We believe this case is too significant to let a split decision stand.”
“Either compulsory dues are an acceptable exception to the First Amendment or they are not,” Mr. Pell said. “A full court needs to decide this question, and we expect this case will be reheard when a new justice is confirmed.”

by Adam Liptak
New York Times
March 29, 2016

                     
March 28, 2016
 
Dear Colleague,
 
This morning, the factfinding report regarding our bargaining with CSU management became public, and we are pleased to be able to tell you that it validates our proposal regarding salary increases for faculty.
 
The major recommendations from Factfinder Bonnie Castrey —the arbitrator who chaired the factfinding panel — are as follows:
Increase faculty compensation with a 5% General Salary Increase (GSI).
Provide Service Salary Increases to eligible faculty (about 43% of faculty members).
Continue to study the faculty salary issue.
Develop a joint strategy for obtaining the needed state funding for the CSU budget.
 
The full fact-finding report can be read here: www.calfac.org/item/factfinding-report-goes-public. We also are holding a news conference this morning at CSU Sacramento to discuss the report with the news media.
 
Despite these findings, CSU management has declined to implement these recommendations. We now have the legal right to strike, and we’re moving forward with our plans to strike on all 23 campuses April 13-15 and 18-19.
 
If you have already committed to strike, thank you. If you haven’t yet pledged to honor the strike, click here to commit to strike.
 
In Union,
 
The CFA Bargaining Team

BY HANK REICHMAN

Last week shortly before I left for Washington, D.C. to attend meetings of the AAUP Foundation Board and the AAUP Executive Committee, I learned that California State University (CSU) Chancellor Timothy White would be addressing a breakfast there hosted by the California State Society, “a social networking organization” serving Californians in the nation’s capital.  So I decided to join two CSU colleagues and a few supporters and attend the event, while about a dozen or more additional supporters demonstrated outside in support of the California Faculty Association’s (CFA) “Fight for Five.”  Perhaps, I thought, my attendance might offer White an opportunity to respond to some of the questions I had asked him on Academe's blog.
 
See Hank Reichman stand up for CFA faculty and students in DC  here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoUzxTjZyc4 

Well, it’s hardly a surprise that this didn’t happen.  Instead, we three faculty members found ourselves seated as far away from the Chancellor as possible.  Moreover, owing to the layout of the restaurant where the event took place, White literally spoke with his back to us, a fitting image given the content of his remarks.
White’s topic was the CSU’s efforts to improve graduation rates, with special emphasis on the importance of Pell Grants in achieving this goal.  One might think that any effort to improve graduation rates might involve a university system’s teachers.  Yet for the entire time White talked the words “teacher,” “instructor,” or “faculty” never crossed his lips.  The Chancellor spoke — although hardly eloquently, as, to be frank, judging from the two times I’ve now heard him speak, he is among the least engaging orators I’ve ever encountered — about efforts to better align curriculum with student needs.  But somehow this was something that “we” in the CSU are doing  — the Chancellor was accompanied by a few campus presidents, including the president of my own campus, and some other administrative bigwigs — and apparently faculty were not involved.

Impatient with the Chancellor’s vapidity, David Bradfield, Professor of Music at CSU, Dominguez Hills, rose to ask White why he was refusing to respond to calls from CFA President Jennifer Eagan to resolve the contract dispute.  White declined to answer.  Soon after I interrupted the speech — and I must admit here that I was getting a bit hot under the collar — when White went on about the need to address the fact that many of our students struggle to find adequate housing and even to eat.  This is a genuine problem, of course, about which I have previously written on the Academe blog (see also this post by Marty Kich).  But the issue on everyone’s mind today in the CSU is the ability of faculty also to find affordable housing and even, in the case of many of our small army of part-time lecturers, even to eat given the low salaries we are paid.  The Chancellor responded that we must “live within our budget,” a comment suggesting he might have read my previous post and recognized how impolitic it was to say we had “live within our means” given the size of the “means” he is provided by the CSU compared to that given to its faculty.Let’s get the facts straight, the facts that White not only refused to mention but even to acknowledge:

• Average annual salary for a faculty member in the CSU — $46,016
• Average annual salary for CSU managers and supervisors — $110,713
• Loss in purchasing power for full-time equivalent CSU faculty since 2005 — down $7,000
• Percentage of CSU faculty who hold “temporary” appointments — 60%
• Average annual salary of those “temporary” faculty members — $27,567
• Increase in full-time equivalent CSU students over the last decade — 75,366 (+24%)
• Change in the number of full-time equivalent faculty since 2005 — +14%
• Change in number of tenure-line faculty since 2005 — down 2%
• Change in number of “temporary” faculty since 2005 — +24%
• Change in the number of CSU managers and supervisors since 2005 — +22%
• Change in the CSU net operating budget since 2005 — +40%
• Change in CSU expenditures on faculty since 2005 — +25%
• Change in CSU expenditures on managers and supervisors since 2005 — +48%
• Additional state funding CFA lobbying helped secure for the CSU in 2015-16 — $97 million
• Movement by CSU management at the bargaining table after the $97 million augmentation — ZERO!

Finally, Susan Green, Professor of History at CSU, Chico, rose to politely ask the Chancellor whether he wants his legacy to be that of the leader who provoked the largest strike of higher education faculty in U.S. history.  Given his silence in response, I guess he does.  At that point we walked out, leaving the Chancellor free to drone on about accomplishments he claims for himself and his administration while ignoring the elephant no longer in the room, but now leafleting and talking with people outside the door — the faculty.

California State University faculty members appealed to trustees Tuesday to do more to avert a strike at the nation's largest university system, but the two sides remain at odds over salaries for about 26,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches.
Members of the California Faculty Assn. urged trustees meeting in Long Beach to consider their legacy and find a way fund the 5% pay raise that faculty members have been demanding for nearly a year. Without a new salary deal, union members have pledged to go on strike in April in what would be the largest academic walkout at a four-year university in U.S. history.
But the trustees' Committee on Collective Bargaining spent the bulk of its time Tuesday hearing about plans to keep campuses open if the strike comes to pass. Athletic and civic events will proceed, students will be expected to attend classes unless the professor cancels them and campus presidents will find ways to provide mental health counseling and other critical services.

Cal State faculty rally for pay raises "We're seeking to minimize the impact on students," said Lori Lamb, vice chancellor for human resources. "We remain hopeful about a potential resolution; however we must plan for the eventuality of a strike."
Board of Trustees Chairman Lou Monville said that no one "relishes where we are now" and asked all sides to work together to secure additional state funding. The Cal State system, he said, is still historically underfunded and has yet to recover from steep budget cuts enacted during the recession.
Those comments elicited groans from faculty members who crowded the meeting room and held up signs with the words "36 days," in reference to the time remaining before a strike.
Union members at all 23 campuses said they won't hold classes or perform other academic work April 13 to 15 or April 18 to 19 if no salary agreement is reached. Strikes could continue beyond April 19 if an impasse persists, faculty union President Jennifer Eagan told trustees.
Eagan, a philosophy and public administration professor at Cal State East Bay, suggested that system leaders are "fiddling while Rome burns."
"Your house is on fire, please pay attention," Eagan said, directing her comments at Chancellor Timothy P. White. "This is your responsibility, and it is happening on your watch."
The union is demanding a general 5% pay raise for all faculty, plus smaller additional increases for those at the lower end of the pay scale.

Using private funds for Cal State execs' pay creates its own problems According to the union, more than half of Cal State faculty earn less than $38,000 in annual gross income, and the pay has remained stagnant for more than a decade. Cal State administrators have said those figures are inaccurate.
White is offering a 2% raise, which he says is in line with increases given to other Cal State employee groups this year. Anything more would cut into funding for academic programs and student enrollment, he has said.
Eagan maintains that with increased state funding and an improved financial outlook since the end of the recession, management can afford to pay faculty more.
She appeared to have some support from Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University who conducted an analysis of the budget situation. He told the mediator negotiating with both sides that Cal State had about $500 million in excess cash flow in 2015 and more than $2 billion in reserves.
See the most-read stories this hour >>Lamb disputed some of those assertions. There is no leeway in the operating budget to shift more funding to faculty compensation, she said. In addition, half of the system's reserves are legally bound to campus organizations that run the schools' student unions, cafeterias and other auxiliary services, and the rest are capital and operational funds that can't be used for recurring obligations such as salaries.
The mediator will issue her recommendations in a final report later this month. Faculty would be authorized to strike 10 days later.
The union previously held one-day strikes at two campuses in 2011 to protest budget cuts.
Trustees will continue meeting Wednesday.
carla.rivera@latimes.com
Twitter:@carlariveralat

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