U. of Michigan Teaching Assistants Stage a 1-Day Walkout By SCOTT SMALLWOOD
Teaching assistants at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor staged a one-day walkout Monday, and they are preparing for an indefinite strike if they don't reach a contract agreement with the administration in the next week.
University officials and negotiators from the Graduate Employees Organization met in a bargaining session that lasted from 1:30 p.m. Sunday to 4 a.m. Monday. The two sides reached agreement on a number of non-economic issues but remain split over wages and child care.
Another bargaining session is scheduled for this afternoon. The union is planning a membership meeting for March 17, which could lead to the first indefinite strike in the organization's 27-year history.
In recent contracts, the TA's at Michigan received the same raise given to faculty members in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. (Those raises have ranged from 3.1 percent to 4.8 percent.) The contracts also set a minimum increase, in case faculty raises were very low. The union is asking for a minimum annual raise of 5 percent, while the university is proposing 2 percent.
With a tight state budget, "5 percent is just out of the range of possibility," said Julie Peterson, a university spokeswoman.
She said the TA's at Michigan, who earn $12,850 for a 20-hour-a-week appointment, are among the highest-paid public-university graduate students in the United States. The TA's also get fully paid health and dental insurance. "Any way you look at it, their compensation package is very generous," Ms. Peterson said. "We're now having a fundamental difference of opinion over what is appropriate."
The two sides remained far apart on child care. The union had originally asked the university to build a facility that would provide free care for the children of graduate assistants. The university said that would cost $4-million and was not the best way to handle child care, which is also a concern for professors and staff members.
Jae-Jae Spoon, the union's vice president, said that the graduate employees' group has presented a new proposal, asking for a subsidy of $2,000 for parents to pay for child care and for a change in the system for allotting slots in the university's existing child-care centers. She said university negotiators did not respond to that proposal in the bargaining session on Sunday.
Ms. Peterson said officials couldn't tell yet what impact the walkout was having on campus. The provost had asked departments to make sure instructors were available Monday for all classes.
But Ms. Spoon said the union was estimating that at least 90 percent of the classes taught by TA's on Monday were canceled. About 600 TA's participated in Monday's demonstration, she said. "We're getting a lot of information out there and making a lot of noise," she said.
The Graduate Employees Organization, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and one of the oldest TA unions in the nation, represents about 1,600 graduate-student instructors at Michigan.