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.