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TAs and students return to class as normal
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by Matthew Dolbey
Friday, April 30, 2004
The University of Wisconsin returned to its normal state Thursday after many students faced a two-day break due to a walkout by more than 1,200 members of the Teaching Assistants’ Association.
Deborah Herman, a staffer at the TAA, said the strike was successful. Many other TAA members have also told The Badger Herald the strikes Tuesday and Wednesday went well and hoped the state’s bargaining unit, the Office of State Employee Relations, heard TAA’s demands for higher pay or lower health-care costs.
Herman said the strike was necessary in the opinion of a “vast majority” of voting TAA members in order to get the state to bargain in earnest, even though the state could discipline striking members.
“I think everyone has always considered there were risks involved,” Herman said, emphasizing that no one wanted a work stoppage. “But members thought the bargaining process [had] broken down.”
Though UW has said it will not take any retaliatory action for the strike, OSER director Karen Timberlake said the state has yet to decide whether to punish the TAA for the illegal strike.
“At this point … we are still evaluating with the university the range of possible responses of the job action, and no final decisions have been made at this point,” Timberlake said.
Though the strike left students with the option of taking two days off to catch up on homework or join picket lines, UW spokesman John Lucas said the walkout, from the university’s standpoint, went better than was expected.
“The impact that we saw was probably a little less than we anticipated,” Lucas said.
UW has asked professors, TAs and project assistants to make up the classes missed by rescheduling lectures or assigning makeup homework.
UW journalism professor Dhavan Shah met with students all day Tuesday and Wednesday at the Memorial Union instead of making his undergraduates cross picket lines.
Shah said he rearranged lesson plans for his classes leading up to the midweek sessions in order to cover necessary material.
“There’s moments built into the course you can rearrange to be accommodating,” Shah said.
Though UW has remained relatively silent on the acceptance or rejection of the graduate-student employee contracts, Chancellor Wiley released an open letter to TAA members Thursday, asking them to reconsider the current contract proposal.
“I urge you to accept the offer that the State of Wisconsin [OSER] has put on the table, with a significant contribution from the university, and let us all return to the primary reason we choose to work and study at this university,” Wiley wrote.
He added that the possibility that TAA members will illegally withhold students’ grades in a grade strike only hurts future bargaining possibilities.
“Any continuation of unlawful job actions designed to gain an exemption from the practice of an insurance co-pay only makes that possibility more remote,” Wiley wrote.
One of the main contentions of the TAA and OSER bargaining sessions is monthly health-care co-payments, where individuals are asked to pay a premium of $9 and families $22.50.
In July, the state would ask individuals and families to pay $11 and $27.50 respectively in monthly health-care dues.
Wiley, in his statement, noted the Republican-held Legislature makes the final approval of contracts, adding that health care has become a political and “philosophical” issue.
