Faculty Rights Tip: I Have Health and Safety Concerns About Where I Work on Campus. What Are My Rights?

While CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia and the Board of Trustees continue to approve funding for multi-million dollar stadiums, half-empty parking lots and dorms, and public-private partnerships with the tech giants who are complicit in renewed forms of environmental racism and the exacerbation of the climate crisis, many faculty and staff work in buildings where asbestos lurks in the walls, classrooms contain falling ceiling tiles, bathroom facilities are questionably sufficient, office windows are sealed shut, and ventilation and air quality vary across buildings and campuses. Meanwhile, on some campuses, administration refuses to hire and maintain an adequate custodial staff, only furthering our sense that safe, healthy, and dignified workplaces elude many of us the in the CSU, and amount to no other than a budget line item for administrators whose offices feature our campuses’ best amenities.

We all feel the disparities – sometimes in our very lungs and bones – and it is empowering to know that our best tools for narrowing and eliminating them are organizing together, and also, knowing and enforcing our contractual rights.

Article 37 is our Health and Safety article in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), and it guarantees our rights with regard to these challenging conditions on our campuses.

In 37.1, it commits to CSU to taking steps to protect our health and safety on the job, stating that:

The CSU shall endeavor to maintain conditions that are conducive to the health and safety of the employees. The CSU shall endeavor to ensure that faculty unit employees will not be required (a) to work in unsafe conditions or (b) to perform tasks that endanger their health or safety.

However, as is always the case, our rights in the CBA are only as meaningful as we make them, when we know our rights and take action to defend them for ourselves and all our colleagues.

When we feel we are working in unsafe conditions, we have the right and duty to report this. Unhealthy and unsafe conditions can mean a lot of different things per the language in Article 37. Perhaps you have a leaky office where water drips onto your electrical equipment, or your workspace makes you pull out your inhaler or tissues whenever you enter, or maybe you work in an environment that is unsafe in the sense that no gender-inclusive bathrooms exist within a several minute walk from your office.

37.7 notes the process or reporting required and subsequent investigation guaranteed by our CBA:

When a faculty unit employee believes in good faith that they are being required to work under unhealthy or unsafe conditions, they shall notify the appropriate administrator. The appropriate administrator shall investigate as soon as possible the alleged unhealthy or unsafe conditions and shall immediately communicate with the faculty unit employee in writing, as to the results of such an investigation and, if deemed necessary, the steps that shall be taken to correct the condition.

While the “as soon as possible” phrase in 37.7 can mean quite different things across administrative units and campuses, you have the right to persist and exercise your Article 37 rights, including your right to request a reassignment, as outlined in 37.8:

A faculty unit employee may request a temporary reassignment when they believe in good faith that their present assignment presents a clear danger to their health and safety. The appropriate administrator shall promptly respond to such a request in writing. Such a request shall not be unreasonably denied during the preliminary aspect of any investigation. If such an unsafe or unhealthy condition is found during such an investigation, the temporary reassignment shall continue until a remedy is implemented.

If your appropriate administrator is not responding “promptly” and they are not issuing you a reassignment during the preliminary phase of the investigation, contact your chapter leadership and faculty rights representative for support in filing an Article 37 grievance, which unsurprisingly tends to speed up an administrator’s sense of their duty to investigate “as soon as possible” in support of faculty health and safety.

And finally, it is vital to know that because CFA is rooted in anti-racism and social justice unionism, our Article 37 recognizes that health and safety are connected to racial justice, gender justice, and reproductive and disability justice. While it is vital that chemists and physicists have access to safety equipment (37.2), it is equally vital that we have access to protection from unwanted contact with university police (37.10), adequate, clean, and safe lactation spaces (37.11), and adequate gender-inclusive restrooms in proximity to our offices and other workspaces (37.12).

If any of these rights to healthy and safe conditions are being violated, get in touch with your chapter leadership and faculty rights representative right away, as these, too, are part of our Article 37 protections, and they have been won through member-led and hard-fought negotiations at the bargaining table, all made possible by a committed and engaged membership of faculty who know that it is our union, led by us, that is securing and defending our rights to breathe, pee, lactate, be represented in encounters with police, and struggle for safer environments on our campuses. Thank a CFA member today, (and if you’re not thanking yourself, become one, too!)

Want to learn more? Become active with your local CFA chapter Faculty Rights team. Find your representative here.

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