Opinion

TAA loses political viability

The grade strike is off.

And for the thousands of undergrads who would have had summer internships, professional and graduate school applications and job applications delayed, this is welcome news. Undergraduates will be able to move on from this semester relatively unscathed by the TAA’s childish job actions.

But for state negotiators and other players in the state Capitol, that the TAs are backing down from threats of a grade strike should come as no surprise.

In enacting a temporary walkout last week that amounted to little more than a coordinated attention grab, TAs effectively drained their fight of political viability, turning a vast majority of students hampered by the self-interested strike away from their cause. TA badgering, as undergraduates crossed picket lines to attend class, disillusioned many such students who otherwise might sympathize with the TAs.

Bascom and Chancellor Wiley, taking heat for the ongoing act of frivolity over a miniscule health-care premium from which state negotiators will not relent, turned heavily against the TAA as well. Though previously supportive enough to offer an olive branch in the form of $300,000 to fund a zero/zero health plan for TAs, the chancellor’s open letter of late last week confirms UW’s switch in stance. The core message of Wiley’s letter was thus: We value the work you do, but stop whining and take the deal.

Our sentiments exactly.

But the TAA may have pushed things too far for policy makers off-campus less inclined to be friendly to its cause. State legislators including Sen. Tom Reynolds, R-West Allis, are on the record as toying with the possibility of withholding the TAA’s bargaining rights. Should legislation such as this pass in the next legislative session; the TAs’ little attention grab could prove to be all but a death knell for their organization. Hence, they took the first politically cogent step of backing down from any more illegal job actions.

Do not for a moment believe the spin put forth by the TAs. The TAA’s recent strike moved them a step back from its goal of a zero/zero health care plan. A grade strike would have represented another political step back; and the political step is one they cannot afford. With Bascom administrators, rank-and-file students, state legislators and the general public aware of the pettiness of their cause, the TAs now find their heels up against a political cliff.