One strike and you’re out

“We must add, however, that when the university does agree to go back to the bargaining table, the TAA must be ready to make a few concessions. So far, the university has been doing most of the giving, and the TAA has a responsibility as a collective bargaining agent to bargain in good faith.”

This editorial board scribed those words March 20, 1970, as the Teaching Assistants’ Association came off a strike and prepared to return to negotiation sessions. Thirty-five years later, our sentiment is unchanged.

Nearly a year has now passed since members of the TAA went on strike, forming picket lines in front of numerous campus buildings, freezing the University of Wisconsin’s business for 48 hours and reducing numerous undergraduates to tears with defamatory chants of “scab” and the like. A miserable public relations failure in every way, the incendiary — and illegal — job action seems to have forced the overly vocal union underground for more than nine months. But the TAA is back now, and they haven’t learned a thing.

All state employees have recently been asked to begin making contributions toward medical premiums. This new policy has two benefits: it clearly works to alleviate the pricey burden placed on Wisconsin taxpayers, and it utilizes various market-based forces to secure maximally competitive and universally advantageous health plans for state employees. The TAA has long claimed that given its members’ relatively low wages when juxtaposed against those of other Wisconsin workers, they should be given a pass on such premiums. The state has responded with a compassionate and reasoned solution in the form of greatly reduced premiums — numbers as low as nine dollars a month offered prior to the union’s strike.

But the TAA continues to feel as though it is above all other state employees and clearly believes market forces ought to be damned in the name of a free lunch. And so, even as they crawl back to the negotiating table, union leaders are still demanding free health care.

It has long been this board’s stance that TAs should be held to the same standards as other state employees, especially when such standards only serve to benefit all Wisconsin workers. That the union still refuses to make contributions to health premiums is unmitigated arrogance at its worst.

The TAA ought to be grateful that its members haven’t been handled by the state as the criminals they became when undertaking a blatantly illegal job action last spring. Now given a second chance, the union should accept the state’s current offer in the most thankful of fashions. They owe it to every other state employee, the students they so badly hurt with their picket lines and the law enforcement officials who have generously turned a blind eye to one of the most public displays of illegality in Madison since we addressed this issue in 1970.