TAs rally for a contract

Forging the early morning hours and unfavorable weather, some campus TAs began picketing as of 5:30 am this morning.

With no resolutions reached in the late hours of negotiations Thursday night, a strike will continue until the University changes its stance.

"If the UW is concerned about undergraduate education, they need to do the right thing," Intemann said. "We want to be paid for our contribution."

At noon today, GSEAC/UAW held a rally at the corner of 40th and 15th featuring several labor leaders, faculty members, and TAs. Despite the rain, a mass of GSEAC/UAW members brought signs and showed their support for the cause, cheering "We will win!"

Although GSEAC/UAW's meet and confer negotiations began last December, a resolution has not been reached.

"Our aim continues to be to get a contract," Intemann said. "We have reached agreement on several issues, but still disagree on several key issues that the bargaining team considers top priorities."

In a campus email sent Thursday afternoon, UW President Richard McCormick wrote both GSEAC/UAW and the UW have worked hard to reach a resolution. However, according to Intemann, McCormick printed several falsities regarding the status of negotiations between the two groups.

"The UW has not agreed to GSEAC/UAW's proposals for TA workload, unpaid parental leave, family leave, and leave for personal illness," Intemann said. "Also, the UW has agreed to eighty-five percent of proposed provisions as it says in the email, but the fifteen percent not agreed upon have to do with non-discrimination and harassment."

"Those are the issues in which the University is resisting arbitration," Intemann said. "I think the number eight-five is a little misleading when the fifteen percent is some of our top priorities."

When Intemann and other GSEAC/UAW negotiators received the email, they took it to the bargaining table and asked the UW bargainers if they had changed their stance. They said they had not seen the email, but they had not agreed upon those provisions in the proposal.

"We [the GSEAC bargainers] said, 'that's not what your President said,'" Intemann told the UW representatives. "When we asked if the mistakes would be corrected, they said they are working on changing the website."

With this email sent out during the negotiations hours before the strike, Intemann thinks McCormick's email makes GSEAC/UAW look bad.

"The email is outrageous. It completely misrepresents us on our positions," Intemann said. "The UW representatives at the bargaining table agree that they made mistakes. But they are unwilling to correct them. This makes us look unreasonable and like we're compromising undergraduate education without reason."

The negotiations between GSEAC/UAW and the UW began last December, on the condition that the UW lobbied for collective bargaining legislation in Olympia. The legislation failed in Olympia earlier this year. GSEAC/UAW continued negotiations throughout the spring despite the collective bargaining legislation failure.

Earlier in May, Washington State Attorney General Christine Gregoire announced the UW was under no obligation to bargain with GSEAC/UAW without the proper legislation. Karen Kavanagh, UW's associate vice president of human relations, said at the time Gregoire's statement will not affect the meet and confer relationship.