When he arrived on campus in 1968, graduate student David Newby found himself amid campus-wide riots and protests in which he desired to take a more active role.
Concerns with a lack of representation in educational policy led teaching assistants like Newby to question how they could gain influence within the educational system two years prior.
These students formed the Teaching Assistants’ Association in 1966 to address such concerns in a cohesive manner, making the TAA the first of the nation’s current 31 graduate student employee unions.
Founding members were primarily concerned with wage bargaining and the state Legislature’s proposal to remove “tuition remission,” which would require teaching assistants to pay full tuition.
“The dispute was over whether teaching assistants were ‘in training’ to become teachers, and they were doing this as part of their education, but they were also providing a service for the university,” UW-Madison professor of history William P. Jones said.
In 1969, former UW-Madison Chancellor Hugh Young proposed an agreement with the TAA continuing the discussion of tuition remission that added a stipulation removing teaching assistants’ ability to bargain wages.
In response, TAA members and undergraduate students launched a campus-wide protest a few months later, shutting down various campus services and the bus system with support from “Teamsters,” members of a blue-collar union.
After three weeks, the strike ended with the TAA conceding and voting to sign a contract with university administration.
Ten years following that first protest, TAA members went on strike once again. The primary issue was that university administration felt many of their grievances infringed on faculty control over educational issues, according to Newby.
“From the beginning it was very obviously a strike for the survival of the union,” Newby said.
TAA members eventually acknowledged the administration would not give in, and the strike ended after five weeks of unpaid protest.
A lifetime member of the TAA, Newby said the relationship between the TAA and faculty and administration improved significantly following the reacquisition of wage bargaining rights in 1985.
“From a number of discussions with current TAA folks, they have been developing ... much closer relationships with the faculty,” Newby said.
According to TAA member and history Ph.D Sergio M. González, the university acknowledged the union as a representative voice of graduate students during 2011 collective bargaining demonstrations despite not generally recognizing other public unions.
The TAA has adjusted its own focus since the 1970s under the more recent leadership from people like current co-presidents Michael Billeaux and Eleni Schirmer.
The TAA started a new campaign to grant graduate employees who are new parents with paid parental leave.
“As it stands right now, there’s currently no paid time for graduate employees who become parents, so we’re looking to get that passed,” Billeaux said.
Schirmer said the majority of graduate student employees are between the ages of 25 and 45 and typically work for three to nine years during a time when people often contemplate starting families, which could suggest potential gender implications.
“A lot of women in particular feel like their academic potential is thwarted by the fact that they want to have kids and there’s not a way to take time off from work,” Schirmer said. “Without a paid leave, women disproportionately have to make those types of sacrifices that men don’t.”
This past fall, TAA members intended to remind administration that many of them are parents as well as graduate students by holding a “play-in” in Bascom Hall, where members and their families spent the afternoon together.
Members held conversations with administrators this past January to follow up on the play-in. Since then, various sociology teaching assistants within the College of Letters and Science brought the issue forward to department heads.
The College of Letters and Science has also adopted a policy in response that grants six days per semester of paid leave for new-parent graduate students, which could allow a domino effect to spread to the other colleges [at UW-Madison],” Schirmer said.
Although some of the projects on the TAA’s agenda have been “side-stepped,” according to Schirmer, members are hopeful that the working relationship between the university and its graduate students has improved as the university has recognized a significant shared interest.
“Graduate assistants play an important role in the educational and research mission at UW-Madison,” Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration Darrell Bazzell said in a March 17 statement. “We are committed to providing them with competitive compensation, and have made adjustments in recent years to bring UW-Madison graduate assistant pay more in line with our peers.”
