Today marks the 24th anniversary of the last strike by the University of Wisconsin Teaching Assistants’ Association, which was held to protest the loss of the TAA’s collective bargaining status in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The anniversary comes as the threat of a TAA strike again looms near.
The TAA recently voted to consider the possibility of a strike in its March 25 membership meeting. Many TAA members said the chief motive for striking would be attributed to the state’s stance on making TAs pay a monthly premium for health care, increasing the cost of TAA’s current zero-cost health-care plan. This vote comes as TAs at other universities across the country are also fighting for higher pay and low-cost health care.
The Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, currently bargaining its first contract as a recognized union with the university, said it was experiencing similar issues with healthcare negotiations.
“Right now, we have a pretty crappy health-insurance plan,” a representative from the GEO said, adding their union bargains directly with the university. “We’re trying to get a health plan like Madison.”
Under the current health plan at Illinois, TAs and project assistants would pay $214 for health care a semester, about four times what Wisconsin negotiators want TAA members to pay.
Illinois’s average annual stipend for a TA is roughly the same as UW’s at slightly more than $11,518. However, the GEO representative said the cost of living around Champaign and Urbana is “nothing compared to that of Madison.”
Strikes are not a foreign concept to the GEO in Illinois. It held strikes in 2001 in an effort to gain official recognition as a bargaining unit.
Some Big Ten schools, like the University of Minnesota, do not have officially recognized unions. University of Minnesota graduate student Melinda Jackson said the university has already had three unsuccessful attempts to unionize. University of Minnesota graduate employees are now trying to organize again, hoping to lower the $10 co-payment system students have to pay on office visits. Jackson also said students might have to pay a premium next year.
However, Jackson said it is difficult to get a contract because there is no organized union.
“It’s not a formal bargaining process at this point … We don’t have an official organized bargaining unit,” said Jackson, adding there is no general blanket covering all student employees.
“Because we don’t have a union, we don’t have contracts,” Jackson said.
The UW TAA, the nation’s oldest union for TAs and PAs, is one of only 25 recognized graduate-student unions in the United States. Some Big Ten universities, like the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and the University of Iowa, do have recognized unions, though others such as Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University and Indiana do not have recognized bargaining units.
However, UW’s TAs and PAs are not the only members of their field considering a strike. Mike Quieto, spokesman for the UW TAA, said two other public universities have asked for information from other TA unions about a “grade strike,” where TAs would refuse to turn in their students’ grades at semester’s close.
The Office of State Employee Relations said what it is asking of the TAA — no raise in the first year and the initiation of health-care premiums — is no different from the demands of other universities. However, the TAA argues peer universities receive more benefits and higher pay. Both say their demands in the negotiations are, for the most part, inelastic.
According to the website asanet.org, UW rates 30th in stipends in the 2001-2002 biennium.
