California Institute of the Arts faculty and staff move to unionise

The Art Newspaper

Angella d’Avignon

26 November 2024

Faculty and staff at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) announced a 71% supermajority in favor of forming a union on 19 November. The group will seek pay increases, better healthcare benefits and transparency regarding salary increases for executive leadership while faculty and staff experience high turnover rates. The last time CalArts faculty and staff pushed for unionization was in 2015, withdrawing their petition soon thereafter.

The unionizing group cites a disparity between cost of living in Valencia, Pasadena and the Los Angeles region where the campus is located, in addition to stagnant wages for instructors and staff in the past few years. In 2021, the school purchased a $4.5m home for its president, Ravi Rajan, whose salary in 2023 was $450,374 with an additional $58,352 listed as “other”.

Meanwhile, faculty continue to struggle. According to organizers, the tipping point came in December 2023 at a town-hall event, when administrators announced that they would be switching staff and faculty healthcare benefits to a “self-insured plan”, essentially exporting their plan to a third party.

“Since the switch occurred, I’ve been able to see one physician who gave me referrals to a number of other physicians in Pasadena—and none of them take this insurance. None of them have heard of this insurance,” Patrick Schmid, an assistant director of admissions, tells The Art Newspaper. “The healthcare shift was really instrumental in motivating us, but that’s the tail end of years of issues we’re addressing.”

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