Bargaining Team Update

TAU Bargains with WMU’s Administration:

The Bargaining Team moves ever closer to the material goal of collective bargaining: getting our first contract. The Bargaining Team has made a very sincere effort to execute the negotiation of the contract in a timely manner, and we have made some very real progress. We hope to present at a general membership meeting this month specific details about the articles under consideration, what the union is bargaining for, and how the proposed articles will change graduate assistant life at Western. We hope to have a contract tentatively agreed on with the Board of Trustees by April, so that the membership can vote on it before finals week.
Our demands are quite modest. We believe that teaching assistants provide a valuable service to the university, a service that is both requisite for the university’s operation as well as desirable for graduate education. This is not to say the course is devoid of obstacles. We are not asking for the sun and moon but decent healthcare, fair compensation for our work, and some protection from arbitrary and eccentric policies. Yet, it’s frustrating when something as simple as a non-discrimination policy statement, taken directly from the Board of Trustees, meets resistance from the administration’s bargaining team. What are we to think? That the much lauded policy statement, which the Board of Trustees heartily congratulated itself on earlier this year, has no real integrity in practice?

Despite such difference of opinion, both sides are committed to getting a contract. From the perspective of the Teaching Assistant’s Union, we deserve a contract because we have earned it.