Teaching Assistants Association

The bill was introduced during the black strike as a component of a conservative strategy to rout out out-of-state UW students, a group blamed for campus discontent.

Citing a lack of legislative approval, campus chancellor H. Edwin Young declined, but reneged when a consequential strike loomed later in the semester.

Young offered to bargain if a vote administered by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission upheld the TAA's claim of majority representation.

[5] After two days of elections, the union became the students' official bargaining agent on May 18, 1969,[6] with 77% of voters overall in support and 52 of 81 academic departments with TAs in majority consensus.

[3] What a parody of progress it would be for us to march backward eating bread and dusty butter as we drag the polluted and competitive present into a lost socialist and democratic future.

[8] The two parties struggled to find common ground on the union's demands for the "bread-and-butter" wages and working conditions alongside additional asks for academic and human rights, such as job security through continual employment guarantees, class size limits, health benefits, office environment standards of light levels and space requirements, policies intended to end discrimination, participation in university governance, and evaluation by teams of students, faculty, and TAs, evenly split.

[10] The TAA reaffirmed the importance of the "educational planning" demand for the future of their generation, and at one point, the university drafted a shared course design clause before it was removed in faculty resistance.

[16] The strike reduced class attendance in the areas closest to the biggest picket site, Bascom Hill, in its related College of Letters and Science and School of Education.

Groups such as the New Year's Gang and the Mother Jones Revolutionary League threatened physical harm if the union's demands were not met, and similar radical influx emboldened some strikers and alienated others enough to leave.

While the demand engendered undergrad support and a similar provision was outlined in the 1969 Structure Agreement, the faculty were now fundamentally opposed.

[3] UC Berkeley teaching assistants also had formed a union earlier under the American Federation of Teachers in December 1964, and had 400 members at one time.