The Last Page
Barkan, Joanne
MADISON, Wisconsin, 1969: Late that spring, after the largest antiwar marches and the student strike that brought out .... the national guard, the graduate teaching assistants at the University...
...Administrators in halls of ivy operate like all anti-union bosses in the market...
...Therefore, TA unions could make demands that would undermine education quality...
...the national guard, the graduate teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin made labor history...
...The union—called the Teaching Assistants Association or TAAsigned its first contract in 1970...
...NYU students have made history no less than the Wisconsin students in 1969...
...Until last November, all were at public institutions...
...In the Hollywood (or West European) version of this story, Madison 1969 would have launched a heady period of unionization for teaching assistants (TAs) around the country...
...NYU was the test case for all private universities and should set off a wave of successful organizing...
...Yet the TAs claim they would agree to limit negotiations to standard workplace issues such as pay and insurance...
...We have a long history of these unions, and they've worked out fine," she said...
...Instead came thirty years of dragged-out battles with relatively few victories...
...Teaching assistants, the board decided, can be both students and employees at the same institution...
...There's been one at the University of Wisconsin, the TAA, since 1969...
...Unlike state laws, they argue, the NLRA does not specify what are legitimate issues for collective bargaining...
...This time, they affiliated with the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers and bargained as state employees under the State Employment Labor Relations Act...
...The antiwar marches up State Street and the national guardsmen with their unsheathed bayonets loomed much larger in my memory...
...The University of California (where Berkeley TAs fought sixteen years for a union contract) and other state schools have set up similar systems...
...They hire the same law firms expert in obstructing unionization...
...They could, for example, insist on multiple-choice exams, which take less time to grade...
...Of almost four hundred doctoral degree-granting institutions in the United States, fewer than twenty-five have recognized TA unions...
...Meanwhile, they exploit low-paid TAs and parttime instructors to teach an ever larger proportion of the total course load...
...It took six years to reestablish a union...
...Rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in favor of Adelphi University in 1972 and Stanford in 1974 squelched TA unions at private universities for a quarter-century...
...They voted in favor of union representation, creating the nation's first teaching assistants union recognized by a university...
...These rulings set the precedent: teaching assistants are students, not employees who can unionize...
...Even the union at Wisconsin had serious trouble...
...The crusade to block TA unions started soon after the Wisconsin success...
...Then last November, I was writing an article about the new union at NYU, and one of the students I interviewed explained why she found the administration's prophecy of educational decline absurd...
...JOANNE BARKAN 128 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...
...The agreement between the TAA and the university had no legal standing...
...Private universities have used the difference between state labor laws (which govern state schools) and the National Labor Relations Act (which governs the private sector) to prove that TA unions won't work for them...
...In 1980, after several strikes, the university simply tore up the agreement, and the teaching assistants were back at square one...
...I was a teaching assistant on the Madison campus in 1969, but over the years, I had almost forgotten the TAA...
...They use the same threat tactics ("You'll lose your fellowship"), dire predictions ("Unions will devastate the unique student-professor relationship and wreck American higher education"), and delaying maneuvers...
...Everything changed last November when the NLRB toppled its 1972 and 1974 precedents and ruled against New York University and in favor of a new TA union...
...Whatever the victories and defeats of the politics of the 1960s, the TAA success had legs...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
