Dear CSU Trustee Chair Bleich,

Congratulations on your new job! I’m sure you will serve our country well. I wanted to commend you for your heartfelt speech given at the Sept. 23 CSU Board of Trustee meeting in Long Beach. In my case you were correct in stating that many in the room had similar stories to yours. I too grew up in Connecticut and dreamed of being a college professor someday. My father earned his BA in business at UCONN on the GI Bill after serving in WWII. He dreamed that all his eight children would be college graduates too. Unfortunately, the state of Connecticut did not share that dream. One older brother and older sister each had some college, but I’m the only one to get a degree, and I had to come to California to find it.

After working as a baker for 16 years (both in Conn. and Calif.) I attended California Community Colleges and, with my 4.0 GPA and guidance counselors promising a bright future through the UC system, I transferred into SF State. My eleven-year path to a BA saw divorce, three-and-a-half years of single parenthood with two young children, and eventually a new relationship that—along with the university experience—helped transform my life into the one of great privilege I enjoy today.

Despite the troubled times we live in I am loving my work and family—I’m sometimes reminded of the Dickens’ opening in “Tale of Two Cities.” Yet I still dream of becoming a professor someday and starting a master’s in philosophy a few years back gave me a taste of that wonderful life. Unfortunately, my academic plan is on hold due to other more-pressing challenges and priorities. Like you, a day does not go by that I do not thank California for believing in me. And like you, I am thoroughly disheartened by the apparent abandonment of the California Dream—especially as this is happening without public debate. However, without your moving speech I was not even sure if the CSU trustees were fully aware of what was happening on their watch. They need to do more, much more of what you did and in public like never before. They need to take our case to the taxpayers of California and stop relying on, like you said, an unreliable system lead by shortsighted fools.

As a union leader who gets the “big picture,” I’m deeply offended when the small-minded call what I do a “special interest.” I tell people that I’m doubly blessed in my union work—not only do I get to fight for the rights of employees in the workplace (extending what it means to be an American into a third or more of people’s lives) but I get to fight for the CSU and all that it represents to California and the nation. Make no mistake; those who would privatize public education have an anti-democratic agenda.* A system of, by, and for elites is their vision for America, what my political scientist neighbor calls, in his book by that name, “Democracy For the Few.” I believe in the Alliance for the CSU, in advocating together because of our shared interests and vision. That same spirit infuses my union advocacy as well.

Thank you again for a wonderful speech and for your service to the CSU and California, but mostly thanks for your recognition of the sacrifice we, the staff, continue to make for the good of both the CSU and California. Best of luck “down under” and remember that Australia was at one time a British penal colony. With examples like that in the world there may yet be hope for California’s future.

Sincerely,

Russell Kilday-Hicks
VP for Representation
CSUEU/SEIU 2579/CSEA

* I highly recommend Thomas Frank’s works on why people vote against their own interests (“What’s the Matter With Kansas?”) and on the difference between moderate and neo-conservative Republicans (“The Wrecking Crew”), and the work of UCSB Professor Christopher Newfield explaining the dismantling of public higher education (“The Unmaking of the Public University”). Also, Obama’s books are pretty great, especially for a president. His chapter on our Constitution is a must read if you are going to work for him. In many ways the nation has some catching up to do to the president’s vision before we will see substantive change.

Related links:
* http://www.calstate.edu/BOT/chair-reports/sept2009.shtml
* latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bleich4-2009nov04,0,1193621.story
* http://toodumbtolivearchive.blogspot.com/2009/07/ucsb-save-uc-letter.html

Rally on steps of SF City Hall

I attended the rally on the steps of SF City Hall on Thursday, Oct. 15. I was asked to speak and was about to but at the last minute was cut from the program due to being over time. After listening to many great speakers (politicians, faculty, students) I was thinking of wrapping up the event with the observation that there was never to this point a public debate on the abandonment of California’s Master Plan for Higher Education and the California Dream. At the chancellor’s office in Long Beach a mock funeral was held for the death of these two. I wanted to tell them that our challenge was to raise them back from the dead.

Rally for AB 656

The week of Oct. 12-16, CFA held events on most, if not all of the CSU campuses. I was a featured speaker at Monday’s event on the CSU East Bay campus in Hayward. The focus of the rally was for AB 656, sponsored by Assembly member Alberto Torrico, a bill that would tax oil as it comes out of the California ground. This is something the other 16 oil-producing states in the country do, and Texas the longest, using the revenue to fund their higher education system. Here is what I said at the rally.

I am Russell Kilday-Hicks, vice president for representation for CSUEU, the non-faculty staff union; and I work at SF State. I stand here today with my son, Liam, who is off from school because it is Indigenous Peoples Day. I hope we can preserve the CSU and would be proud to have him attend this university system someday.

I attended the last few Board of Trustee meetings at the chancellor’s offices in Long Beach. At one of these, Lt. Gov. Garamendi tried unsuccessfully to get support for AB 656. So what has been the trustee plan for replacing shrinking state support for the CSU? Over the last 20 years they were on bended knees begging for corporate support, through voluntary donations. I ask you: How is that working? Why won’t the trustees support taxing California’s oil wealth so that higher education can have steady income to continue providing the opportunity a quality education offers to the children of working people in this state? Because, as BOT Chair Jeffery Bleich said recently, 656 as written takes away some trustee control on how the money would be spent. What Bleich didn’t say was they might be concerned it will also offend the wealth they are wooing for donations.

What we are seeing is a failure of a political system to provide for its people. Governors appoint the trustees. The current governor says he wants to “starve the monster,” which is the name he gives to the public sector, including the CSU. The attack on the higher education budget is a strike against democracy. The elites will always have their ivy league to send their children to. In the elite worldview, the children of working people don’t need higher education; they only need job training. It’s time the CSU had trustees we can trust to not only preserve the CSU, but to expand it to fill the yet unmet needs of California for a universal education where you learn to think critically, a crucial ingredient for a healthy democracy. The current trustees are merely managing the decline of a once great system. We need leaders who believe in a government that provides for its people. Thank you for being out here today. Let’s continue to show the trustees and the next governor that this is what democracy looks like.

Comments to the CSU Board of Trustees

9.24.09
Last time we were here we had just bargained a furlough agreement, and that was good. The system is in crisis and we rose to meet that challenge together. At that time I had asked that the sacrifice we all make to work here, because we believe in the CSU, especially the sacrifice from those on the bottom, people my union represents — I’m talking about custodians, laborers, and poorly paid office workers throughout the CSU who voted by more than 80 percent to take a cut so the CSU can only turn away 40,000 students rather than 95,000 — their sacrifice must be appreciated. Now — I understand we are all new to this furlough business and there are still some bugs to work out. Unfortunately, the spirit of cooperation in crisis that created the agreement has lost something in the translation getting to some of the campuses — managers not accepting that a pay cut means less work will be done, programs implemented that don’t follow the agreement and without working with local union leaders, even petty stuff like HR directors trying to dictate who they will and will not meet with. I’m asking for your help in reinforcing that message — that this sacrifice not be taken for granted — that this institution do everything it can to see that its employees get all due respect in the implementation of the furlough agreement.

Speech to the CSU Board of Trustees, 7/21/09

As part of the ratification process for the TA, I just visited five campuses. At each one there were employees who were upset about being asked to trust management that the cuts would be applied to all in the CSU. I told them that these cuts are not coming from the chancellor or the trustees but from the governor. I told them the reason the governor can get away with this is because the taxpayers of California believe him when he says that we can no longer afford the CSU. Essentially, what this system offers, along with the other two branches of higher education in the state, is opportunity, hope for a better future. This is the very opposite of the production of misery, the business of what’s been called the fastest growing public housing in the country: our prison system. What a sad state we are in that that system grows and we continue to shrink.

The question I want to put to everyone here today is: Do we still believe in the CSU? If we do, then we must work together to renew our promise of hope to California and to take it one step further: offer the same hope, not just to the students but to the employees as well. We must be a model institution and prove our worth to the state and our worth to the human investment each of us makes in the CSU. My union, in accepting the “share the pain” principle of furloughs has taken this on trust. Please don’t let us down.

Dear President Obama,

A great crime is about to take place.

Opportunity is about to be dampened down by a great leap backward.

Some call it a budget. I call it a crime.

Some say we have no choice. I say, we have every choice before us.

Some say it’s just bad weather, a great storm passing through. I say, like Katrina, our leaders are working through and with the forces of nature to wreak their path of destruction, their scorched earth policy, to make manifest their dark, fear-filled vision.

Back in the waning days of Gray and the beginning days of Arnold upon California, another D.C. administration had the opportunity to set our state aright. When the ghosts of robber barons rose from the dead to clear cut the vast riches once more, it was prudent to look the other way, to chuckle at our plight, to partner in crime because they only saw unfriendly blue on the western shore.

Arnold, once again, made a bargain with the devil to take power’s seat, and many millions will feel the pain. As his first act, he stopped the effort to recover the stolen treasure and set the state on the downward path we now follow.

He came with a plan. “Government doesn’t work,” he said, and proceeded to make it so. Why are we surprised at this? It should be clear to all by now, a snake is a snake and a bad actor is a bad actor.

We know the perpetrator, we know the weapon, we know the place, all’s that needed to seal the deal is a simple two-thirds vote and a drop of red ink on paper, and our fate is sealed.

The government has a responsibility to not just protect us from evil, but to offer hope. To provide for the positive freedoms, you said, not just freedom from oppression, terrorism, coercion but freedom to become all you can dream (with all your rights granted under the constitution: the Bill of Rights II, healthcare, homes, education, and meaningful work).

Will you come to freedom’s aid in our dark hour?

American Union Heroes

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/06/11/american-heroes-american-union-members/

Obama message and National Day of Community Service

On Jan. 20 a new president and administration begins in Washington, D.C. I was asked what this means to me and this is what I said: “As a labor leader fighting for the rights of state employees every day this inauguration has special meaning. After eight years of draconian policies and outright attacks on working people there is no question I would rather be supporting a new agenda in America taking us in a new direction. I see President Obama doing these things: returning us to civility in government and public debate, reaffirming domestic and international law, giving us an acknowledgment of and commitment to addressing the catastrophic affects of global climate change (not to mention science in general taking its rightful advisory role in public policy once again), and reordering our national priorities to put workers and their families — and their dreams — out in front because their daily toil is the bedrock of what makes this nation great.”

This is my expression of hope and I realize no one of us can do this alone, including the president. I encourage each of you to share with me what this change in government means to you and I can post them on our website or in our newspaper. Thanks. Now let’s get to work.

MLK Day is National Day of Community Service
One of our negotiated holidays is ML King Day on Jan. 19. This is also the National Day of Community Service. I encourage you to go to this webpage:
http://www.usaservice.org/page/content/eventsearch and find a community service event near you. I did a search within 10 miles of my home and came up with way too many choices. Lots of good groups need our help for those less privileged, whose numbers are increasing during these hard economic times.

Support the Employee Free Choice Act

<a href=”http://www.freechoiceact.org/aflciovideo”><img src=”http://www.freechoiceact.org/page/-/efca/oms_150.jpg” /></a>

Speech to rally for social and economic justice

This is a speech I gave today at a rally in San Francisco put on by the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition. 

Greetings — I’m Russell Kilday-Hicks and I work in the 23-campus Calif. State University system. My union, the Calif. State University Employees Union, part of the Calif. State Employees Association and SEIU Local 2579, represents 16,000 of the non-faculty staff forming the backbone of the CSU.  We do the mostly invisible work of cleaning the floors and toilets, tending the gardens and cutting the grass, filing records, looking after student health, and running computers and offices that enable the faculty to teach and a university education to transform lives.

 

We’ve seen the CSU cut by well over half a billion dollars since 2003, with another 212 million dollars just this year. Each year different campuses take turns going into fiscal crisis and start cutting programs and classes and hemorrhaging faculty and staff. Meanwhile, with the backdrop of Chancellor Reed playing violin, the trustees make deals in the back room to make sure CSU executives can afford a vacation home, or a yacht, or however the well-to-do spend labor’s wealth. Meanwhile, the students and their families are paying double the fees of just three years ago and each year threatens more increases, and the CSU can’t even come close to meeting demand, turning away tens of thousands of qualified students, and those in classes can’t get the courses they need to graduate — harder to get in and harder to get out is the new CSU creed. Meanwhile, we who run this place are expected to take on more students every year with fewer resources. In old-fashioned labor terms this would be called a factory speedup.

 

The workers and students are suffering the effects of a starved system, true, but the ones who ultimately suffer are all of us, the entire State of California. Every fee hike is making that door to opportunity a little harder to open. The citizens of California need to understand that cutting funds to the CSU is the very opposite of what needs to be done in hard economic times. Our higher education system is what made California a leader in the world and we are being told there is no money to continue to invest in our future. There’s plenty of money for illegal invasions and occupations, financial bailouts, and new prisons — this is certainly someone’s twisted dream of a future, but it need not be ours.

 

Education is a right not a privilege.  Work with me to restore California’s commitment to our collective future. A free public education is not unfair competition for the so-called for-profit University of Phoenix. A free public education is a necessity for our times and for restoring hope in our youth and real profit for us all instead of society’s wealth for just a few.