"the vital issue of teaching assistants' unions"

"Probably the most exploited and alienated group of people on any campus are the graduate student teaching assistants. The forces of the multiversity hit them from two directions - both as students and as teachers. As students, they have been around long enough to have lost their awe of academia. As faculty, they are given the worst jobs for the lowest pay. For the most part, they have no illusions about their work. Their working conditions, low pay, and the fact that their futures are subject to the whimsical machinations of their department chairmen [sic], make them a group ripe for radical organization. Furthermore, their strategic position within the university structure makes them potentially powerful as a group, if they should decide to organize and strike. If they go out, a large part of the multiversity comes grinding to a halt. The kinds of demands they are most likely to be organized around naturally connect them with a radical student power movement and with the potentially radical sector of the faculty. Moreover, these considerations make the organization of a radical trade union of TAs a crucial part of any strategy for change. We should see this kind of labor organizing as one of our first priorities in building the campus movement."

-From the SDS pamphlet, "The Multiversity: Crucible of the New Working Class," by Carl Davidson, early 1967. As reprinted in Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, eds. The University in Crisis Reader, Vol2: Confrontation and Counterattack. New York; Vintage Books, 1971. 118-119

More on this later, perhaps. The "most exploited" claim is problematic, as are a few of the other arguments Davidson makes, but it's interesting to see articulated plainly a strategy I'd read about before but never seen spelled out by one of its proponents. It would be an interesting project to track this position into the campaigns at Wisconsin and Michigan and elsewhere, as well as the earliest battles at the private universities which began to occur not long after the Wisconsin campaign began - Yale in early 1972, NYU in 1977, and I don't know the rest of this history but it would be interesting to look at.

2nd Edit: Sorry, I wrote the previous paragraph at 3 in the morning, and it was a bit incomprehensible, so i have reworked it a little to make it slightly less so.