Faculty Feature: A Valentine’s Day Faculty Love Offering: CFA Saved My Job

“I was laid off last January,” said Maribel Diaz, CFA member and CSU Long Beach lecturer. Coming back from vacation, one day to the next, I was told I was laid off and there was no work for me. If it wasn’t for CFA, I would have stayed laid off. It turns out they were violating the contract, and I was able to come back in August of last year. We filed a grievance, and here I am now.”

Diaz was hired in October 2022 as a full-time lecturer whose main task was to serve as a practicum instructor for the Strengthening Youth Resilience (SYR) program at CSU Long Beach (CSULB). The program, which is a partnership between CSULB and the Boys & Girls Clubs in Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD), aims to help middle school students and youth foster healthy relationships and improve their overall quality of life.

As a school social worker of 14 years, Diaz supervised nine university interns who administered mental health services to two Long Beach middle schools.

Regardless of positive evaluations from her interns for the two years she had been at CSULB, she found out she was laid off for Spring 2025. She was told that LBUSD was taking over the SYR program and that there would be no more work for her. However, the layoff came after she had already been assured a teaching position even after the program discontinued or concluded.

“It was all so confusing,” she said. “I was working under a three-year grant and the funds were there. I didn’t understand why I was being laid off. I was then told I could apply for unemployment, so… I started looking for other work.”

Perplexed as she was, Diaz tried to shrug it off. But she couldn’t.

“I needed answers,” she said. “Why was I fired? Why did they let me go? Yet when I pushed the issue, the administrator just said that there was no work for me. I would have just moved on, except they weren’t giving me my vacation pay.”

“I had to apply for CalWORKs food stamps and GR (General Relief),” Diaz recalled. “There I am with 53 dollars in the bank in early February thinking, ‘What the heck is going on?’”

Refusing to give up, Diaz contacted her CFA chapter’s field representative, who quickly realized that management had violated her contract and encouraged her to file a grievance.

“I didn’t think this would happen at the university,” Diaz said. “I’ve been in the workforce since I was 16 years old. Being a social worker, being the advocate for people, and championing others… and then I get laid off. If it wasn’t for CFA, I would have been out of work.”

After escalating her case to a Level II grievance, she was contacted within days and informed she got her job reinstated. “Our field representative reached out and told me that CSULB needed to get me back to work immediately. We were also able to get back pay since they violated my contract,” said Diaz.

Yet, when she was ready to return, her position no longer existed. Instead, management stuck her in a stationary administrative role entering data all day. Not only do her disabilities and the pain that accompanies her past injuries make these tasks unbearable, but the role simply isn’t what Diaz feels strongly about.

“I went to grad school to become a school social worker, licensed clinical social worker, and came to CSULB to work for SYR and have the opportunity to teach, not to do data entry,” she said.

Even as she faces these challenges, Diaz’s mentorship has been impactful. One of her interns changed her field of study and noted Diaz as the primary driver of her obtaining her Pupil Personnel Services Credential (PPSC) and becoming a school social worker. Diaz initially supervised her during her first year in the SYR program, but the intern later returned in Fall 2024 after getting her master’s degree in social work so she could work under Diaz’s supervision once again.

Diaz’s grievance has progressed but remains unresolved. While there have been some positive changes, she’s in this for the longer fight.

“I’m an advocate for everything we do as a union,” she said keenly. “I’ve always been a union member wherever I go. I even had my interns out on the picket line with me during our last strike in 2024.”

However, Diaz pointed out that, because she was new to CFA, she wasn’t well-versed in our contract just yet. Regarding her layoff, Diaz remarked, “Had I known a little bit more, I would have sat there and told them: ‘No. I want union representation right now.’ In fact, it was my colleague—another CFA member—who told me to reach out to CFA for help.”

While management still has not given Diaz any clear indication as to why she was laid off, she wants us to know that every faculty member should be paying attention to what is happening right now at the bargaining table.

Specifically, Diaz is talking about what happened at the most recent bargaining session on February 3, in which management proposed removing CFA from layoff decision-making. Most egregiously, management believes they should no longer be required to consult with CFA when there is concern for layoffs and would only notify members when they’ve already made the decision to lay off faculty.

“This proposal is even scarier than what happened to me,” Diaz said. “Faculty really need to get involved in bargaining so that our safeguards don’t go away. Let’s make sure that what happened to me does not happen to others.”