In continued disagreement with the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Employee Relations disapproval of state employee contracts, the Teaching Assistants’ Association held an informational picket yesterday afternoon outside Memorial Union.
The JCOER returned contracts of thousands of state employees to the Department of Employee Relations for further negotiation, citing an utter lack of funds in light of the state’s budget crisis.
“With this action, we are allowing the DER to make fundamental reforms needed to keep good faith with the taxpayers,” said Assembly Speaker Rep. John Gard, R-Peshtigo.
Rebekah Ravenscroft-Scott, a University of Wisconsin sociology TA and member of TAA, said about 150 workers showed up for the rally.
“We’re not just TAs. Members of other unions on campus like academic staff, clerical staff, custodial workers, machine shop staff and UW physical plant workers [are also present],” Ravenscroft-Scott said.
Ravenscroft-Scott said the TAA was part of a coalition of unions on campus that is currently meeting to reach a consensus as to what their next step in the negotiation process should be. Ravenscroft-Scott said TA salaries are not paid for out of the money the UW makes off of students’ tuition.
Upon the rejection of the employee contracts by JCOER, the Wisconsin State Employees Union tentatively refused to return to the bargaining table. The WSEU then announced it would hold a meeting of its local presidents and leaders to discuss their next step in the negotiations and scheduled the meeting for today.
“Those meetings are taking place on Thursday,” said Marty Beil, executive director of the WSEU. “We really won’t know anything until then.”
Budget cuts included in the budget plan Gov. Jim Doyle presented to the legislature would eliminate 900 positions and $250 million dollars of state funding for the university.
Mike Quieto, president of TAA local 3220 said he feared the cuts proposed would affect quality of operations on the UW campus.
“We have real concerns that further cuts could jeopardize the university’s ability to fulfill its mission,” Quieto said.
UW TAs are part-time employees and each TA is assigned to teach a certain amount of hours. The number of hours can shift based on UW budget constraints.
“The graduate assistants and the students live in uncertain times; they worry about layoffs, reductions in services and classes, and increases in tuition,” Quieto said. “The legislature could go a long way to abate some of those anxieties by committing themselves to no further cuts to the UW.”
The contracts the JCOER rejected had been negotiated last March and had been waiting for approval since then.
“It’s important to make the distinction that these are last year’s contracts being negotiated,” said Boian Popunkiov, a math TA at UW. “How are we going to bring a new contract to the table if we haven’t had the old one approved yet?”
The TAA is the oldest graduate student employee union in the nation, and it is affiliated with the Wisconsin Teachers Federation, the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO. It represents nearly 2,900 teaching and project assistants.