CFA Fights for Faculty in Cal Maritime and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Restructuring Meetings

While university administrators tout the successful restructuring of Cal Maritime and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (SLO), CFA members have been fighting for faculty in negotiations over the disruptive process.  

Together, members from both CFA chapters have won agreements covering union assigned time; retention, tenure, and promotion (RTP) process, entitlement for lecturers, and travel between the campuses that are about four and a half hours one-way by car.  

The CSU Board of Trustees approved the restructuring of the two universities into one Cal Poly in November 2024. Aparna Sinha, CFA Maritime President and Cal Poly Professor, said the union has negotiated multiple Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) after meet and confers were held every month since the implementation. For much of the last two years, this restructuring has looked to faculty like a goal without a plan.  

Sinha said CFA and management recently signed an MOU on union assigned time after nearly a year of bargaining, and after management attempted to unilaterally cancel the union rights it previously negotiated. CFA Maritime won three years of separate assigned time from CFA San Luis Obispo. The agreement will expire in 2028, but Sinha said management agreed to revisit it in the future.  

“Faculty at Maritime need representation,” Sinha said. “There are a lot of needs and grievances on our campus that are very niche and specific to our campus. Expecting our CFA siblings at SLO to take care of SLO faculty and also Maritime faculty is not fair.”  

She added that the CFA Maritime and SLO chapters have been negotiating everything regarding the restructuring together. They support each other, demonstrating what solidarity looks like.  

Lisa Kawamura, CFA San Luis Obispo President, CFA AVP of Chapter Presidents, North, and Cal Poly lecturer, agreed.  

“We all worked really well together, and we understood that we had a common goal,” Kawamura said. “We didn’t let our differences divide us but rather worked together to make stronger arguments and understand each other’s conditions and why it’s important for us to have strong union representation on both sides.”  

While the Cal Maritime Faculty Senate approved a resolution to merge with the Cal Poly Academic Senate, the CFA Maritime will remain as its own chapter. The two have other differences besides location. Maritime has about 90 faculty and 800 to 1,000 students, while SLO has about 1,500 faculty and 23,000 students.  

Kitty Luce, CFA Maritime Treasurer, CFA Librarian Committee Chair, and Cal Poly Librarian, said SLO has so many more policies and things take much longer. Maritime also has unique needs, such as materials you can’t buy from standardized vendors selling academic books.  

“It’s not necessarily better to be standardized,” Luce said. “It’s good to be able to respond to your community.” 

The restructuring has also affected Luce’s ability to buy textbooks using funds from an alumni donation budget. The budget is “floating somewhere” because of the changes, Luce said.  

Information Technology restructuring issues create more work and frustration for Maritime faculty, too. Sinha and Luce said faculty had to wait months to be paid for work travel and learn a new system to submit grades. When the email accounts merged, faculty could not access tools essential to doing their jobs.  

Management’s insistence that Maritime and SLO faculty be put on the same pay calendar created another ordeal, Sinha said. CFA negotiated for 0% interest loans to be made available to Maritime faculty, who won’t get a paycheck on September 1 like they usually do because management is putting them on the SLO pay calendar. The loans must be paid back in three years. 

CFA and management have worked out the biggest issues of the restructuring, but Sinha said management could come back and say they need to do something else. Then the two parties would need to talk about how it affects the faculty. 

As SLO begins following a semester system instead of quarters, Kawamura said other issues may arise. But whatever comes next, faculty at both Maritime and SLO retain the ability to be fairly represented by union leaders who understand the campuses in which they work.