The Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) is a labor union representing graduate students who are paid for part-time teaching and research assistance at the University of Wisconsin's Madison (UW-Madison) campus. It began functioning as a labor union in 1969 although it had existed since 1966 as a graduate student organization working to improve undergraduate education and to gain better pay and employment conditions for teaching assistants (TAs).
The Association was formed during the spring and summer of 1966 by TAs concerned about the possibility that the grades they gave would affect the draft status of male students. Many TAs did not believe that the function of selecting soldiers should be part of their role as educators and actively opposed the Vietnam War. Eventually, student deferments were no longer based on grades, thereby eliminating this as an issue for the organization.
During the next two years, the TAA became involved in negotiations with academic departments over TA employment and joined with undergraduates in an attempt to reform education at the University. Because of its political genesis and the interests of its early members, the Association also supported social movements and radical activities on the campus. Participation in a 1967 student strike to protest police brutality against antiwar demonstrators led to a fourfold increase in the organization's membership.
The TAA did not become broadly representative, however, until the Wisconsin legislature's January 1969 attempt to increase tuition for TAs gave it a “bread-and-butter” issue around which to organize as a labor union. After an intensive campaign during which a majority of the 1,900 TAs designated the Association as their bargaining agent, the University, under the implied threat of a strike, agreed to recognize the TAA, provided its claim to representative status was confirmed by a campus-wide election. The TAA won the ensuing May 1969 election, becoming the nation's first union of college teachers to gain exclusive bargaining rights.
From May of 1969 to March of 1970, the Association concentrated on bargaining its first contract. Among the demands posed were the standard “bread-and-butter” items of labor-management negotiations. But the union went beyond the traditional economic aims of American trade unionism to embrace the policy and power issues that motivated many of the student strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
When both university-wide and departmental level negotiations proved unsuccessful, the 900-member union conducted a five-week strike accompanied by an undergraduate boycott of classes. Finally, on April 17, 1970, a contract was signed between the two parties.
While much of the union's energy in subsequent years was devoted to contract bargaining and enforcement, two important organizing programs were undertaken. The Association actively encouraged the formation of TA unions at other campuses and strongly supported the efforts of clerical, food-service, and research workers on the Madison campus to organize themselves. In February 1974, the TAA became Local 3220 of the American Federation of Teachers. In affiliating with the nation's second largest teachers' union, it sought to tie the struggles of teaching assistants to those of teachers and the labor movement in general.
