Mar 16

Written by: Ronnie L. Grant
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 

Comments of CSUEU President Pat Gantt before the CSU Board of Trustees Committee on Collective Bargaining, March 16, 2010.

Click here to download the MP3 file of the entire Committee on Collective Bargaining. (1.5 Mb) (Sorry for the audio quality; it was recorded from their live stream and the overmodulation distrortion appears to be coming from the CSU's end.)

The full text of Pat's comments is below:

I want to thank you for this opportunity on behalf of the 16,000 employees I represent. I regret to inform you that the issue of layoffs at the Chancellor's Office, CSU East Bay and CSU Humboldt is a difficult one indeed. The layoffs are as follows: one layoff at the Chancellor’s Office, 86 employees at CSU East Bay, and 65 at CSU Humboldt. We take these notices very seriously, and we’re working hard with university to make sure they are implemented in accordance with the CSU/CSUEU contract.

A rough start was reported for the layoff of 86 employees at CSU East Bay. Workers were brought into administrative offices in groups to be told they were being laid off, with uniformed police officers on hand. Unfortunately, television news cameras were there, filming without our employees’ knowledge or permission. That was unfortunate, but it’s behind us now. We hope we can move forward. We have begun a dialogue with CSU Humboldt and Chancellor’s Office and hope that those layoff notices can continue to be implemented in a more reasonable way. We are awaiting replies so we can get on with mitigation and save jobs. We hope the CSU system’s budget will restored to some realistic level so it protects our staff and so we can increase our role to meet students’ needs. I’ve delivered a copy of my last budget update, written after the January Board of Trustees meeting. In it, I pointed out that the CSU has been living with budget cutback problems over 10 years. With the CSU, we are making contacts with legislators, urging restoration of funding. We appreciate the work that presidents are doing to mitigate or prevent layoffs.

We want to make sure you are aware of the impacts of cutbacks, and we know we are working in concert with you in our efforts to help legislators understand those impacts. Campus presidents, you will be all hearing from our members soon. Chancellor Reed, the measure of our relationship is our ability to reach an agreement on mitigation of layoffs. So, please, direct campus presidents to go to the table so we can work on the layoffs with them. Thank you.