Interview with Arlen Christenson

Arlen Christenson #21 (1976)

AC: It was my first semester back teaching after spending three years as deputy attorney general. And when I came back, Ed Young asked me sometime during that semester if I wouldn't come to work for him half time as assistant to the chancellor and legal advisor, starting the next fall, the fall of 1969. And I said I would. In the meantime, the TAA business had begun to develop. And they were demanding recognition and bargaining. And so probably, or undoubtedly, because I was going to be legal advisor in the fall, they asked me to serve on the committee that bargained with the TAA representatives. The structure agreement.

I guess, as a matter of fact, I got involved in it even earlier than that. Because I think the issue of when I started discussing the matter with Ed Young, it was not the structure you mentioned looked like, or that kind of question. But really my [unclear] response, if any, should be made to the demands for recognition and bargaining by the TAA.

LS: He talked to you about that. He presumably talked to others, too.

AC: Yes.

LS: But did you, were you his principal advisor, do you think?

AC: No, I wouldn't put it that way. I think there were probably, oh, I would say, on this issue, Bryant Kearl and Jim Stern. And as much or more input as I 00:02:00did into the discussions [inaudible]

LS: But it was largely a legal question, wasn't it?

AC: No, not really. The legal question, I think, was pretty clear. At least, I thought it was pretty clear. The legal situation is that there was no legal obligation to bargain. There was no statute, no law, under which the TAA could claim bargaining rights, nor one that would establish the ground rules for bargaining. And throughout, the chancellor, well there was something of a legal issue on the question of whether the chancellor didn't just voluntarily or not. There were people who took the position that, around the country, including 00:03:00[Springford?] at Iowa that in the absence of a statute authorizing a state agency to bargain collectively, it did not have the legal authority to do so. So I guess, some to think of it, there was something of a legal issue there.

But I, my view on that was that the Iowa position and the position that perhaps some others had taken on this were wrong. And that in fact if the chancellor or if the [unclear] chose to do so, they could bargain. I thought there were some limitations on that they could agree to. But it wasn't any legal obstacle to bargaining with someone with the authority to represent you, as well as 00:04:00bargaining with individuals.

So the issues that the chancellor was concerned about at that point were only partially and, I think minimally, legal issues. They were more issues of policy, what should the university's position be with respect to [unclear], or was there anything. In making that decision, the chancellor [wanted?] to keep in mind that there were various groups that the university was involved in and with in one way or another as employer. There were the classified civil service employees, who were operating under collective bargaining agreement, and had been for a few years.

There were the, there was the faculty, which did not bargain collectively. And of course there was not, there was the non civil service, or the unclassified employees. Non-faculty unclassified employees of the university. And then in addition there were other student employees, and student recipients of grants and scholarships and fellowships and awards of various kinds. In addition to teaching assistants, research assistants, and the project assistants, then the employees of the Union and the residence hall and so forth.

And all of these groups had different relationships with university administration. And different employment arrangements. And in deciding how to 00:06:00respond to the TAs, the chancellor had to keep in mind that all these other groups were around and would be watching this.

So the kinds of questions that he had to deal with were more questions of policy, of that sort. How he would respond and deal with all this complicated situations rather than legal questions.

LS: And you advised him to recognize them, did you?

AC: I guess so. Although the implication of that is, at least what it conjures up in my mind, is asking me should I recognize them, and asking Jim Stern should I recognize them. That isn't the way it worked. We just sat around and talked a 00:07:00lot, and everybody had a say. And the position that evolved in those discussions was that the chancellor ought to respond by saying that yes, when you go recognize you and bargain collectively if we can develop the conditions for that. Which would include such things as agreeing on the scope of bargaining, and agreeing on how you were going to establish that you in fact represent the TAA issue.

LS: Why was Jim Stern involved in this? Why was he consulted here?

AC: Well he, Jim was a long-time colleague of Ed Young's in the Economics 00:08:00Department. He is, he teaches collective bargaining in the public sector. He is a former staff member of United Auto Workers. He worked for Walter [Reeser?] for a number of years. And very commendable.

LS: So he's both a friend and he was, he was experienced. Yeah. I just wondered, because there were so many people he might have chosen.

AC: Right.

LS: Well, there's Bryant Kearl and Jim Stern.

AC: Right. Bryant Kearl was vice chancellor.

LS: Yeah. He left, didn't he? He went away shortly after that.

AC: Right. About, sometime between, I think it was probably in the fall of '69 when he left.

LS: Was this Emory Bretzman--

AC: Yes.

LS: Was he also--

AC: Bretz is, was then, in central administration. In charge of collective bargaining relationships with the classified employees of the university, both here and in Milwaukee. I guess that was before the merger. So central administration at that time meant Madison and Milwaukee.

LS: How did you, was this before any TAs had gotten in touch, was it that you knew that this was going to come up? Or had the--

AC: My recollection is that they had contact with the chancellor.

LS: They had a meeting of March twenty-first that came to the chancellor. And he refused to recognize them then. And then he did recognize them on the 00:10:00twenty-eighth. Was this the twenty-ninth? Or was it earlier that you were talking?

AC: I think it probably was a little earlier that I started talking with him. It was right about that time. Not much, it might have been between the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth. I'm just not sure. But at the time I started talking with him, I know that he had not yet decided to recognize, or to say that if we can agree on these things, we will be recognized. So it was sometime before the twenty-eighth, but I'm not sure if it was [unclear]

LS: Were you influenced by the amount of power they had in your decision?

AC: Yes. Amount of power in the sense that one of the questions was to what 00:11:00extent did they represent the views of the TAs in general. If they represented all of them, and this is what all of them wanted, then that was one thing. If they represented only a very small group, then that was quite another. So that was a [unclear]

LS: And what did you conclude?

AC: Well, we concluded, at that stage, that they probably represented a substantial minority. And that, but not a majority. And, but I guess enough so that you couldn't say that they were just a bunch of individuals who were going 00:12:00out on their own. They had, and one of the things that seemed pretty clear, the TAs at this point, and graduate assistants generally were pretty unhappy, because of the legislative proposal to, because I remember, I can't remember--

LS: They were going to waive the out of state tuition.

AC: That's right. That's right. They would not get their, Shabaz introduced this proposal in the legislature. That got them all shook up.

LS: Yeah. Well, according to the Cardinal at that time, they had a vote. And 92 percent of 1500 TAs voted. And 92 percent would have been willing to strike over that issue. So that must have given you a clue that they were aroused, anyway.

AC: The fact that that figure is probably the usual accuracy of the Cardinal, I'd be astonished if in fact 92 percent voted that they would strike over that. 00:13:00It's possible. But anyway, it was quite clear that a very large majority of TAs were very upset about this. And not only the TAs, the university and everybody else. The administration, faculty, and everybody else.

But then there was still the question that okay, assuming that, to what extent do these guys, Muehlenkamp has with Marketti and the guy from physics, I think, was involved, whose name I can't remember at this time. I can just see him, but I can't remember his name.

LS: Richard [Rhein?] or Richard Williams or Robert Ebert or--

AC: They were involved at that time, but they sort of disappeared after, they probably graduated or something.

LS: Yeah.

AC: I just can't remember. Anyway, the question was to what extent do these guys 00:14:00represent the TAs. There really wasn't anything except their own representations that suggested they were [unclear].

LS: Of course Jim Stern knew Marketti.

AC: Yes.

LS: Because he was his advisor.

AC: Yes.

LS: So he must have felt more in with--

AC: Oh, yeah. And Jim, some of the other people in the Industrial Relations Institute were also involved. And Jim was talking to them from time to time. And so we, we knew that it was, from the beginning, that it was more than just these guys who were coming there, [unclear] Marketti, that there was, there were some 00:15:00others who were behind them, but we didn't know how much. And we didn't know whether there were others we should be talking to and so forth and so on. So that was, that was something [unclear].

So anyway, that, during those discussions, I think that one of the biggest reasons that chancellor decided, or at least one of the big reasons in my mind that I thought that we ought to get down to bargaining with them is that it's pretty hard in a state like Wisconsin to take the position that you will not bargain collectively with people who want to bargain collectively. And moreover, 00:16:00if they struck on such an issue, they would be, it seemed to us pretty clear that the AFL-CIO unions would support them. [unclear] as a very important principle. If one of our [unclear]

LS: Oh, I see. As it was, the AFL-CIO didn't support the--uh huh.

AC: And the difference was, is pretty clear. That if they were to strike over recognition, then they would be fighting over an issue that the AFL-CIO considered important and [unclear]. When they struck over educational policy, the AFL-CIO said, in effect, what is this nonsense? [unclear]

LS: That's interesting.

AC: And that was a very important part of the decision making. And after that, I 00:17:00think that the chancellor and the rest of us shared this general philosophical position of most people, I think, on the faculty, that employees if they want to, should be able to bargain collectively.

But, you make that decision, and then there's lots of other very important questions about bargain about what, under what circumstances, and so forth. And there, one of the big issues, or the big factors in decision making was that you did have a state collective bargaining laws covering other employees. The classified employees of the university were bargaining under that law, which contained certain limitations on what they could bargain about. And certain 00:18:00[unclear] bargaining, under which bargaining could take place. And one of the firm principles that the chancellor held to all the way along was that the TAA bargaining structure could not differ significantly from that of the classified employees. And what that meant primarily was that we did not bargain raises.

LS: I think you bring this up in your article.

AC: Yeah.

LS: Henry Haslach said that the chancellor thought of them as radicals and recalled Marvin [Brixon] warning him about this. And that when they went to see [Brixon?], Brixon asked them if they were communists. Did he, did Ed Young think 00:19:00that they were communists, do you think?

AC: Sure. Well, I don't know about communists. I think that it was, that he thought, and he was right, the fact is that they were, by and large, left wing idealogs. Communists--

LS: But he didn't think they were, well, there is--

AC: Whatever. I don't think anybody talks about that kind of identification. But in their literature was full of [unclear] about this is not just an ordinary union strike, this is a strike to restructure the university, which in turn will restructure the world. And that was quite clear that that was the position that they were taking, and it was quite clear that Haslach and Marketti and Muehlenkamp and [unclear] felt that very strongly. But nobody ever saw it in 00:20:00terms of communist or whatever, people who were involved in this on the university side were a little more sophisticated than that.

LS: Apparently, Brixon [wasn't?]. Do you remember the first meeting that occurred between, well, were you at the meeting on the twenty-first, when I--

AC: I think I was. I think I was, but I just can't remember. Let me check a file here and see if I can--

LS: [unclear] you've got a lot of notes on this.

AC: [unclear] not organized notes. Everything is very [unclear] Here, according 00:21:00to this, that meeting was on March twentieth.

LS: Yes, because it comes out in the paper the next day. And you were there.

AC: I'm not sure. I think I was. But I'm not sure.

LS: What I'm driving at is when was the first meeting when you were aware of what the character of the discussion was going to be, and the personalities of the people you were going to be bargaining with, and what your feelings about it were.

AC: That's hard to recapture, because came too gradually, and it became more and more apparent as we got into the substance of bargaining, as distinguished from 00:22:00the structure. But I guess, I guess it was pretty clear from the beginning that the, the representatives we were dealing with were a long ways from traditional union collective bargainers. I don't know what, not really, their ideology was not that much of a factor in bargaining the structure agreement. The main thing 00:23:00there was, I guess, both the bargain and that, you know, whether or not, regardless of what their political views are.

LS: No, I wasn't thinking of their political views. I was thinking of the name calling and the sort of attitudes.

AC: Oh. That was from the beginning.

LS: It was.

AC: Yeah.

LS: And you were prepared for it, or--

AC: I wasn't right off. But it was quite clear from the very beginning that there was mutual distrust. And that continued. That was one of the biggest problems in the whole business of negotiating. I don't find anything in here 00:24:00that gives me a clue as to when I first got involved. I just don't know if I was at the first meeting or not.

LS: Do you want to comment, say any more about that? About the distrust?

AC: Well, I don't know that there's much more to say. The collective bargaining experience I had before this, [unclear] had been as legal counsel to a couple of labor unions in Minneapolis [unclear] up here. And by and large, the leaders of 00:25:00those unions, well, they were, their discussions were based on the premise that this was an ongoing relationship, and on the base of underlying questions, was helping maybe to [unclear] And to let that relationship continue and [unclear] to work together in the future. So I was used to that kind of approach to bargaining.

And that was just totally absent from this confrontation. There was no indication that the people you were dealing with cared about next week. Much less, five years down the pike. And that was really one of the big differences. 00:26:00You could see them take positions that you simply couldn't, they had to know were completely inaccessible. They had to know that the administration and the faculty just couldn't live with, and they didn't seem to care. And that was from the beginning. And that was one of the big problems and issues.

LS: They felt that you were never, that you were, you were stalling for time through the bargaining. That you had no serious intention of bargaining, is the 00:27:00way Soren put it in his article.

AC: [inaudible] They always said that. But it just wasn't true. When we said we wouldn't agree to what they proposed, then they said you're stalling. And when we said, "We think you're wrong on that proposal," then there [were signs?] we were refusing to bargain. Well, it just wasn't true. We just didn't agree with them.

LS: You felt [to move?] along fairly rapidly.

AC: Yeah. As far as the, we moved as much as we thought we could. And their problem was that they didn't agree with what we wanted to do. And we had, from 00:28:00the beginning, too, although it was less of a problem with the structure, but in this basic problem that they started and they [left early ?] was one of [unclear] the earning [unclear]

LS: Yeah. Mm hmm.

AC: Stated this clearly. They started from the proposition that they ought to bargain just like a union bargains in the private sector. Over all of the bargaining rates with private sector union [unclear] And we said, "Look, you can't do that. We have a state law which limits bargaining on the part of all the other employees in the state. How can we say, well, despite that, we'll go ahead and bargain with you on your terms?" And that was the basic deadlock from the beginning.

LS: But why did Loeffler subscribe to this? He must have known that it was not 00:29:00possible. Did he lead them, do you think mislead them into--

AC: I don't know. I never have figured out the extent to which Dave took the positions he did because he thought they should do that, and the extent to which he took them because that's [what he finds moderate?]. I am not sure.

LS: Would you normally know with an advisor?

AC: Not necessarily. And I think, though, that, yeah, I think probably, I think I would ordinarily be able to tell better than I did with him. I guess that's hard, because of his combination. Dave is, has always been pretty radical. He 00:30:00was about a lot of things.

And I think that to a large extent we shared the views [unclear]

LS: How old was he?

AC: Let's see. That's about six years ago. I suppose Dave was about thirty.

LS: Oh. So he could identify with them easily.

AC: [unclear] And in any event, I think that, well, and on this issue, too, that's not really a terribly radical position. A lot of people in public employee bargaining take that position that there's many reasons why public 00:31:00employees shouldn't have the same bargaining rights as private employees. And there's a, as a philosophical matter, I don't quarrel with that position. As a practical matter, though, as we kept telling them, we couldn't do it. How do you go to the civil service union and say that we won't bargain with you on [wages?] because the law says we're not supposed to? And yet we're going to bargain on [wages?] with these upstart TAs. [pause] [unclear] collective bargaining for something that was a sticking point from the very beginning. TAs wanted to bargain on everything that could be bargained on in the private sector. And our position was that we have to stick to the limitations of the state law that governs classified employees.

LS: And what you had said was that every meeting, this was brought up.

AC: Right.

LS: This sort of, as a matter of routine, I gather.

AC: And the notes I have here indicate that, and this is consistent with my recollection, to. That was one of the big issues, the unit determination and selection of representatives. That is, the question of whether it should be a campus-wide unit or departmental units, was a tough one. And the no strike agreement was probably the third biggest issue.

LS: You mean you wanted them to agree not to strike, and they refused.

AC: Yes. Right. Right. And that was, again, the same principle, that the other 00:33:00state employees were bound by a no strike provision. And [unclear] and the folks bargaining said, we're going to bargain, you should have the same limitations on bargaining as we have on other employees.

The unit determination [unclear] was a separate kind of problem. It rises out of the fact that there's an awful lot of decision making [unclear] at the department level, of the kind that will affect TAs and the [unclear] university. And so we, we had to grapple from the beginning with the problem that how you can fit this collective bargaining business into a decision making structure like that. It differs markedly from the usual private corporate structure, where 00:34:00there's somebody at the top who can make decisions and pass it down to the bottom and say, "This is the way you shall do it." If the chancellor were to say to a department, "This is the way you shall teach freshman English," the department would say, "Go fly a kite. We decide how we teach freshman English." And that was, that was and I think continues to be one of the difficult problems in this relationship.

LS: You raise that, in your article you say that the TAs took that issue to 00:35:00WERC, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, and that they couldn't get the decision they wanted, but the WERC would have been willing to arbitrate. And the chancellor was. But the TAs dropped it. You said that that was a time-consuming development. Why did they drop it? Do you know?

AC: I'm not sure. It may just be that they decided that they wouldn't get the decision that they wanted from the WERC. I just don't know. Because that was, of course, as I said in the article, one of the big problems was that as these issues came up along the way, the question was what should be done, if there 00:36:00were a collective bargaining law, and one of the key things that a collective bargaining law should have is a decision maker. Somebody you can go to and get a decision on that. We didn't have that.

LS: Yeah. And you really can't have.

AC: No. Not at all. Except if the parties will agree. That was what they decided there. All right, we don't have a decision maker, but let's agree on one. On this issue, the WERC can arbitrate. As a matter of fact, I think that was their idea at first. I think they said, "All right, let's have the WERC arbitrate." And we said okay. I think we first said we didn't want to, and then we said okay. And then they said, "Well, no, we don't want to."

LS: Would they have been taken seriously by WERC and given--

AC: Yes. Right.

LS: So it was just on the merits of the matter that they felt they might want to.

LS: The, so then, Ed Young chose a group, after they agreed to bargain on the twenty-eighth, or the twenty-seventh, then he chose a UW team. Or at this point, was it selected by the representatives of the department?

AC: No. That was Ed Young's committee.

LS: And they, that team, you were on that team, started meeting in the middle of April.

AC: Yeah.

LS: April eighteenth is when it shows up.

AC: I guess that's it. That's when we started. Although the proposals started 00:38:00changing hands before it. Because I have one here, a proposal from TAA, proposals on recognition and structure of collective bargaining agreement, which was received in the chancellor's office, it was April 1, 1968, this stamp. That's obviously not true.

LS: Well--

AC: That's what it says.

LS: They couldn't possibly have started that early, you think?

AC: No. It must be April 1, 1969.

LS: Create a bit of a [unclear] a story. (both laugh)

AC: Let's see.

LS: Well, that's true. I have, "first meeting, question mark" here. As April eighteenth.

AC: What I have is a, let's see. Here's, the first thing I have is a letter dated March 24, 1969, to Ed Young, from Bob Muehlenkamp, saying that we indicated you at our meeting on Thursday, March 20, the TAA is a labor organization and so forth, authorized by a majority of TAs to act as a collective bargaining unit. It says that "Thursday's meeting, you indicated you would respond to this written request by Wednesday, March 26. We look forward to beginning substantive discussions as soon as possible."

Then I have a March 26 letter from Ed Young to the TAs.

LS: Is that the one that was in the Cardinal? A letter from Ed Young to Muehlenkamp was printed in the Cardinal around this time.

AC: In which the recant for this letter is there's lots of problems in this whether we operate under the big bargaining law or maybe all kinds of different ways to approach this. And he says, "In conclusion, let me complete the university's administration is quite willing to meet [unclear] to discuss bargaining with teaching assistants. While explorations of institutional change have long [unclear]." So basically what he says was that we can't just go ahead and agree, that we'll bargain with you [unclear] a lot of things they talked 00:41:00about before we get to that.

LS: Incidentally, I should ask you about the, the TAA's claim that they had a majority of the TAs holding union cards or whatever.

AC: Right.

LS: But it subsequently turned out that they didn't. I guess you know that.

AC: Yeah.

LS: Several years later.

AC: Right.

LS: But you wouldn't have been very bothered by this, because you felt that, as you said earlier, you felt a substantial minority in any case was committed to this process.

AC: Right. And that was enough to get us talking to them. But remember, we did require that they have a representation election before they would be recommended. And we sort of doubted the claim from the beginning.

LS: Oh, so it wasn't crucial.

AC: No. Because one of the things that we felt from the beginning was that we'd probably have to insist on a representation election anyway.

LS: However it came out. Yeah.

AC: Here's a letter from March twenty-eighth--

LS: Wait a sec. [pause]

AC: It indicates that we're going to start talking early in April. Muehlenkamp says, "We'll send you our proposal by Tuesday, April first." That is the proposal that's stamped April 1, 1968.

LS: I see.

AC: "And we would like to met on Thursday, April third."

LS: Muehlenkamp was coming to these meetings, was he?

AC: Yes.

LS: Because later on, he didn't come.

AC: Yes. Right. Right. In my recollection, in the structure bargaining--

LS: Well, when did he stop coming?

AC: He was there off and on all the time.

LS: Right up through January.

AC: Yeah.

LS: I see.

AC: That's what I recall. He continued to be president, as I remember.

LS: He was president, yes. But I, I guess it was during the strike that he didn't come because he was organizing.

AC: I think [unclear]], yeah. He had other things that he was doing.

LS: But I had pictured him as not being there all along.

AC: He was there, from time to time, at the beginning he was there, and during the structure agreement, he was there all the time. And during the bargaining on the contract, he was there some of the time. Marketti and Haslach were there all the time. And the guy from physics, whose name I still can't remember, was, I 00:44:00think, secretary. And he was the note taker of the--

LS: Gary Klein.

AC: Well, [unclear]

LS: That was [two weeks after Carl??]

LS: Well, who did most of the talking? Or, that's a leading question.

AC: In the structure bargaining?

LS: Yeah.

AC: Marketti and Loeffler.

LS: Loeffler was in from the very beginning, then. And this was throughout?

AC: No. Loeffler was not there very much at all during the bargaining on contracts. Until the mediation [unclear]

LS: So then, what, Marketti and Haslach, or mostly Marketti, who did the talking.

AC: Right. Marketti and Haslach. Zorn. Let's see, I guess Zorn, when did Zorn come in? He was president, [unclear] campus president. But I don't--

LS: I think later on.

AC: Yeah.

LS: The next year, I think.

AC: I believe that's right.

LS: What was your impression of Marketti? Can you, as I told you before, I got these fairly strong statements about him from some of the others.

AC: Yeah.

LS: I wondered if you shared their feelings.

AC: Well, I read the [unclear] and I guess it comes on stronger on Marketti than I would. I sort of thought that he was, I think it was quite clear that he was the leader of the group. And [unclear] collective bargaining because, in part, he was the experienced one. In that, by our experience, and so forth, he knew 00:46:00more about collective bargaining than the rest of them. It was also quite true that he was very tough and very strong streak of, he was as ideological as any of them. And as committed to the proposition that they were more than just an ordinary union. They wanted to do all these other things, too. But as a matter of fact, about the only thing that I would say that distinguished him from the others was that he knew more about collective bargaining.

LS: Doremus described him as, felt that he was a small time hoodlum was the term 00:47:00he used for him.

AC: I wouldn't say that at all. He was very able. Very hostile. He was probably as hostile as any of them. And you had the feeling with him that he just didn't like you. Which was also true, I guess, of Haslach. A little less. And I think less so yet with Bob Muehlenkamp. But they all had [unclear] They didn't like us, and we could tell. It was very apparent.

And they didn't, it was this kind of thing that you heard from a lot of students 00:48:00at that time. I remember one session I had at a dorm. I was there as the chancellor's representative. And we were talking about drugs. Nothing to do with TAA bargaining, but one of the students said, "I don't trust you. Don't take it personally. There's nothing personal about it. But I cannot trust anyone in your position." And that was a recurrent attitude that the TAs, whether, regardless of what they thought about us personally, they didn't trust us. That permeated the whole [unclear]

LS: This must have made someone like yourself feel very odd.

AC: Yeah.

LS: Because you were--

AC: Yeah, it sure did. I'd always thought of myself as a fairly trustworthy person. And as I said, my background had been in representing labor unions. And I always considered myself a liberal. And this was kind of a strange position for me to be in.

LS: And you were so much attached to, both you're not as old as some of the others, and you were not yet attached to the administration, I suppose.

AC: That's it. That's it.

LS: When did Neil Bucklew come in? And the reason I'm asking that is why you weren't maybe chief arbitrator as I gather some people would like you to have been?

AC: I had a lot of things, I was working half time as a legal advisor and half time teaching. And I had a lot of other duties I also thought of important. I 00:50:00had chancellor [unclear] that legal advisor making at least some of the [unclear]

LS: Oh, I see. So he didn't ever, he didn't ask you to become the chief [unclear]

AC: Not as I recall. I think, again, and the same kind of thing there. I guess this is Ed Young's style, and the kind of relationship that we had, I don't really remember during the times when he would say, "Do this, do that." He'd talk about things and then get decided. Most of what I did was what I thought should be done.

LS: Yeah. Well, you must have been aware that some of the other members of the Council of Ten would prefer to have had you as the chief bargainer. Were you aware of that?

AC: No. No. I really wasn't.

LS: You did make a comment last time which I was hoping you would say again. That you wouldn't have wanted to commit yourself to that position.

AC: That's right. I have never viewed myself as being that much of a partisan. I do like to try to maintain some objectivity. And I just didn't like that role. So if somebody would have asked me to do that, I would have said I don't want to. Although, in the heat of battle, pretty clearly I was not that terribly objective in many cases. The frame of mind was, you want to win, whatever that 00:52:00means. And particularly in this context, where the people on the other side of the table were so good at making you angry. So I certainly wasn't the model of detached objectivity. But I thought that I was playing the role that was [brokered?] to me. And [unclear] the shortage of time. I, all the time in that job, I had a continuing struggle to keep my half time appointment there from overwhelming me. And during the TAA negotiations, [unclear] and it did. I really 00:53:00didn't, everything else I did suffered.

LS: I was going to ask you, you were at the meetings, of course, on Thursdays and Tuesdays. And how much more time you put in specifically into the two?

AC: Oh, hours and hours. We were gone many evenings.

LS: We?

AC: [unclear] or Neil Bucklew and I. Meeting with the chancellor or something. And I suppose we were all, Neil and I were putting in a double work week [unclear] and at the same time, I was trying to teach a class. So I don't remember the details of any discussion about this. But it was clear to both Ed 00:54:00Young and I that when we got into collective bargaining on the substance of an agreement, that we were going to have to have somebody else to be the spokesman for bargaining. And Neil was available. And I thought did an excellent job. And I think we were lucky to have him.

LS: Oh, you do.

AC: He did a very good job for someone with no more experience than--

LS: In what way did he do a good job?

AC: Oh, he was well organized, well prepared, had some good ideas about what proposals should be made and what shouldn't be made. And I thought he was a pretty effective spokesman at the bargaining table. I suppose he did have some 00:55:00shortcomings. Basically shortcomings of experience. In any event, we all did. None of us were really experienced bargainers. I had never been involved in bargaining except at [unclear] experience I had before. A couple of times I got into the bargaining right at the end, when some legal issue would come up and they'd say, "Hey, we want you here on the bargaining." And [unclear] Most of the time, I just [unclear] They would come to me when they had questions. I didn't know that much about [unclear]

LS: How did your inexperience show up? Of the group that was bargaining.

AC: I really don't know. I don't know that we could have done a whole lot better 00:56:00if we had been experienced.

LS: What you said, or your attitudes?

AC: I suppose that it would be, we were probably more thin-skinned than we might have been, had we been more experienced. And reacted more strongly than [unclear]

LS: Reacted in a sense of responding, or digging your heels in, or--

AC: Mainly responding. Responding in kind. I don't know now whether that was good or bad. All I'm saying is that I think if I'd been a bit more experienced, I wouldn't have done it.

LS: Do you want to say anything about some of the other, your fellow, [unclear], Doremus, [Mulvin?] [unclear] which of them were better and which were worse at 00:57:00this? [bell sounds]

AC: Excuse me. [pause] I don't know. We did not adopt a firm policy of only one spokesman at the bargaining table. We, all of the people on the bargaining committee were pretty [unclear] and their [unclear] Although we did have sort of, [inaudible passage]

The result was that the others would chime in fairly often. And I [suppose?] it was pretty clear that Bob Doremus had the strongest feelings about people on the 00:58:00other side of the bargaining table. And I guess you could say that he was, on the bargaining committee, we was ordinarily the least [brilliant?]

But I didn't detect any. Maybe I wasn't sensitive to some things that were going on. I didn't detect any serious divisions of opinion or problems in relationship to [unclear] And I'm surprised if there was some [unclear] I didn't hear any of that myself. I thought it [went fairly well?]. I still don't know, I still don't 00:59:00know, really, what we could have done, should have done differently.

LS: I was going to ask you if you had thoughts about that.

AC: Not really. I think that we did about as well as we could have done. That was a difficult situation. It still, the basic problem I mentioned when we were talking earlier, of a decision making structure in a university where you'd have [unclear] division. You not only have the division, the regents, or the head of the university system and although I think most of the time they concur in what their administrators do, administrators always have to be concerned about what the union [unclear]

And then you have the chancellor at the campus level who has a lot of 01:00:00authorities, but definite limitations on what he can do, imposed by the traditions and principles of faculty government. And then within the faculty, you have the problem of division of responsibility between the campus level and the department level. So everything we did, we had to worry about well how will this affect this department and that department? Will they be able to [unclear] Will they be able to [unclear] How would the chancellor buy it? The Council of Ten? The Faculty Senate? The regents? Just incredibly complex.

LS: The Council of Ten was your first stop, wasn't it?

AC: Right. That was always our first stop.

LS: Do you want to say what happened there?

AC: Oh, we had, I'd said a number of times that some of the toughest bargaining 01:01:00we did was with the Council of Ten.

LS: Your article [unclear]

AC: They, boy, if we could sell it there, we could sell it most anywhere. And everything we did, we never made a proposal. We never put anything on the table at the bargaining sessions that didn't have the approval of the Council of Ten.

LS: What is this group of people, Burns, Byrd, [Cobaly?], is it, [Koch?], Lacy, Noel, Wishner, Sherman--they were appointed by the representatives of the departments.

AC: Right. We had several meetings. The whole policy group, which consisted of any representatives, I think usually the department chairman, but not always, 01:02:00from every department that had fifteen or more TAs. And at our first meeting of that group, we decided that that group was too large to function [unclear] day to day bargaining. So [unclear] then selected ten people for the Council of Ten. They would [unclear] And they also, from that Council of Ten, and sometimes from the policy group, too, we would have, in addition to Neil Bucklew and Bob Doremus and I, who I think were at basically every bargaining session, we would have others who would come sometimes.

LS: Yeah. As they wanted to. Or you would ask them to at work. Which?

AC: We, there [were all occasions?] we should have about five, at least five people there.

LS: So you'd call up and say, "Would you come?"

AC: Right. Right. We sort of developed the [unclear]

LS: Did they all cooperate?

AC: Very well. Right. It was a good relationship.

LS: They weren't as much involved as you were. So it was, for them to come once a week must have been a little harder, in a way. Set aside--

AC: Yeah. That's right. Because they wouldn't be [unclear]

LS: Yeah.

AC: And that, as a result, they were less likely to speak up.

LS: I hope I'm not--well, I would like to know why you couldn't have one number for some departments, one class size number, and one for other groups of departments.

AC: This, as I recall, that was sort of the position we took in the beginning was that, I think we held this for a while, that class size should be bargained at the departmental level. This is a continuing question as we went along, if you could handle that this campus [unclear] began to [unclear]. And I guess it's fair to say that the basic TA position was that most everything should be handled at the campus level. And our position was that quite a few things should be handled at the department level. And this was one of them. And they simply didn't buy that proposition.

LS: I can see that would have been a very serious stumbling block.

AC: Yeah.

LS: Because so much money would be involved, for one thing.

AC: Incidentally, one of the reasons that we modified our position on 01:05:00departmental bargaining as we went along was because the people in departments started saying, you know, [unclear] with those guys. (laughter)

LS: Oh, yeah?

AC: And so you get more and more it went on, the less sentiment there was for departmental bargaining.

LS: That didn't come out anywhere. I can see that wouldn't, didn't, being said on telephones.

LS: Did you expect to be able to settle without a strike?

AC: I guess it's hard to answer that because it's hard to [unclear] time. I guess I certainly had the hope all around that we would be able to reach an agreement without a strike. And probably that hope was based on, more on, less 01:06:00on fact and more on emotion. But as I said earlier, the dynamics of this kind of bargaining [unclear] Farther along than that, more and more we got [unclear] the position that we wanted to reach an agreement.

LS: You described this as a craftsman's, the psychology.

AC: Right. And have a job, begin to feel that your job is to reach an agreement, and you're trying to work with language, try to work with concepts so that you can develop something that both sides can agree to. And it does become sort of a craftsman's job. You think that success is reaching an agreement. Well, that's 01:07:00one of, in fact, that's not true. Success, and Ed Young used to remind us of this from time to time, that reaching an agreement is not, that success is not always reaching an agreement, because if you have to go [through part of this?] agreement, then you're not successful. And he would say, every now and then he would say, "Well, remember, there are worse things than a strike." And we'd say [unclear], yes, there are worse things than a strike. Bargain away something you shouldn't, that's worse than a strike. But still we get back into the middle again and start bargaining and tending towards agreement at all cost.

So I guess on the question of whether I ever thought we could reach an agreement 01:08:00without a strike, I think intellectually I probably pretty well knew all along that they were bent on striking, and it didn't make much difference what we did, there was going to be a strike. And one of the main goals we had to have was to make sure that when we reached that strike point that bargaining was in such a shape that we could go to the public and say, "Look, we have been reasonable. This is what we have. [unclear] start, we can, you should support it." But all along, so, that whole [unclear]

LS: Jim Stern was [unclear] the last meeting before the strike was called. Do you want to say why? You asked him?

AC: I can't remember. I didn't remember that that had happened. I can't think of any specific reason other than that Jim was the most experienced collective bargainer around. And we probably thought that it would be good to have him around to give us some advice at the last minute. That's the only--

LS: Did both Haslach and Doremus think, thought that Ed Young had asked them to, well, I suppose--

AC: I'm sure that that sort of thing, Neil Bucklew and I would, as I say, meet regularly with them and we'd talk over what we were going to do next, and so forth.0

LS: But you didn't talk that over. It wasn't an issue in your mind.

AC: No. [unclear] Jim, Neil and I were talking with Jim [unclear]. And I suppose that maybe it was just a sort of a natural evolution of our discussions that reached this point and caused me [unclear] and he said, "Well, why don't you come to this session?" He said, and I did come to the session. But I don't remember it being a very significant issue.

LS: Haslach thought that he was advising [a general along?]

AC: That's true. Sure. Jim would, he wasn't, although advising, maybe in that 01:11:00context, puts more emphasis on it than, he was one of the people that he talked to regularly. Another one was Bretzman. He talked to him regularly. Those two, I think, particularly.

LS: Well did you know Fred Sherman?

AC: Mm hmm.

LS: He was the TAA's legal advisor.

AC: Mm hmm.

LS: Somebody other than Loeffler, apparently.

AC: Right. Right.

LS: Well maybe he was in your position.

AC: During bargaining, I remember bargaining on the [unclear] Right. We were then, [unclear] but he served as their faculty advisor, and spent a lot of time [unclear]

LS: They thought he was good.

AC: Yeah, I guess so. He was, I don't know how, I don't know if he was that much of a faculty advisor.

LS: Well, do you have anything else you want to say about the sort of interim period, the bargaining period?

AC: No. I think that that's pretty well [unclear]

LS: Oh, I did want to know, did the committee take votes to decide whether to support your position or not?

AC: I don't think, it seems to me it was pretty much by consensus.

LS: Uh huh.

AC: And [unclear] I think we almost always had a consensus. I don't remember any situations where we said well even though you won't go along with this, we're going to do it anyway, [unclear] individual--

LS: I mean, the arguments weren't so strenuous and people on different sides that they finally had to say well, which position shall we take?

AC: No. No. I don't remember that happening. What we would do is we would modify the proposals until we got everybody to use that. And many times people would say, "They're dragging me kicking and screaming, but I'll go along."

LS: Oh, I see.

LS: Well, let's talk about the strike and the various thing that happened in the strike period. One thing is about Loeffler and Hillerman, and why Feinsinger was brought in, who brought him in.

AC: Yeah. Well my recollection of that is that after the strike had been going on for some time, the only union that observed the picket line was [unclear] TAA 01:14:00was the Teamsters. And as a result of that, Don Eaton became very much involved in the substance of what was going on, because, of course, there was problems, caused some real problems for [unclear]. And I don't, much of what I'm going to say is speculation, because obviously I wasn't part of the discussion on the other side. But then I think that probably as a result of pressure from the Teamsters, the TAs decided that they wanted to try to get mediation.

LS: Yeah. I think that is, that's what Haslach said, that Eaton was responsible.

AC: That's where all the [unclear] And they then contacted me, and asked him if 01:15:00he would mediate. And he said he would. And then I assumed that, I don't know if Nate then contacted me or Ed Young, one of us. I think he probably talked to me. And I said, "Well, Ed Young isn't very excited about mediation." And he wasn't. He didn't like the idea. I think he didn't like the idea of anybody mediating, and Nate was no exception.

But as time went along, and the strike, we started talking more and more about it and said, "All right. Why don't you go [unclear] meet with Nate." [unclear] And we did. And then, at the same time, Dave Uehlman got into the act as one of the senior partners in Dave [unclear] law firm. And I have a hunch there were two more mitigating factors there. One was Dave [Luckner?] was spending an awful 01:16:00lot of time for not any pay on this matter. And Dave Uehlman was [unclear] And secondly, Dave represented Teamsters Local 695. And I'm [unclear] and he asked me to [unclear]

So he did. And mediation, then, became one involving Lacy, then myself, and Neil Bucklew on one side. And Loeffler, Uehlman, Marketti on the other. Marketti and Muehlenkamp, Haslach, from time to time, two or more of them would be there. But Marketti was there all the time. And we, I guess, again, I simply cannot 01:17:00remember. I find this hard to understand why. I cannot remember exactly the role that Ed Young played. The extent to which he had come to the meetings, it seems to me hardly at all. But apparently he must have been at a couple, anyway. But mainly it would be Neil and I, and [unclear]

LS: Now why wasn't it the others on the bargaining team?

AC: Too many.

LS: Why two of them?

AC: I can't remember, as a matter of fact, there may have been, no, I guess not. I think from time to time we would have--

LS: Well you know, Doremus didn't seem to have known that this was going on. But 01:18:00you said that you hadn't thought of it as--

AC: I don't think there was--just that when we went into mediation, the issues were pretty narrow. And it was merely a question of, we didn't move much at all after a year. As a matter of fact, I think that probably was the reason that we didn't worry about involving other people. Because you weren't going to go anywhere.

LS: Haslach said that it didn't accomplish anything.

AC: Yeah.

LS: You would agree with that.

AC: Yeah. Oh, yeah. They didn't get anything out of [unclear]. They didn't get anything out of the strike. They were in a better position before the strike than they were after. I guess that's probably the main reason we've been worried about involving Council of Ten people and so forth. Because again, we agreed that we don't have anyplace to go. We've given them all we're going to give 01:19:00them, and it's a question of maybe [unclear] help save face or something. But we've gone as far as we can go. And that was absolutely clear to us after that last faculty meeting. The main place that we had problems was in educational planning. And it was clear as a bell, the faculty said, "You went too far. And don't go any, you back up, and that's it."

LS: Now this is the faculty meeting after vacation.

AC: Right.

LS: Is that the one you mean? Yeah.

AC: When the faculty adopted a resolution that said here is the provision that you will buy on educational planning, period, and we will not go any farther. And so we went back to the TAs and said, "Look, this is it. You can strike till doomsday, and we can't go any farther than this."

LS: But you know, the statement on that is that Ed Young had planned the three 01:20:00different faculty motions. You don't agree with that.

AC: I certainly never saw any evidence of it. All the evidence I had was to the contrary. We had sold Ed Young on our proposal, and he went along with it. And the reaction from the faculty was, generally it was within the faculty.

LS: And you retracted what Ed Young had offered.

AC: Right. And I think that all that happened there was public. That's all there was to it.

LS: Did the injunction have anything to do with anything? Nobody seems to have, it seems to have happened on the side, and not to have bothered everybody.

AC: It was, I think it was, might have been fairly significant as a public relations matter. That clearly established a strike was illegal. And it clearly seems to me it might well have had an effect on the TAs who hadn't voted to stop 01:21:00the strike. Because it was clear then that they were going to lose money. That they were not going to be paid for the time that they were on strike, and that they were not going to be recovering it later. And that the whole thing was illegal, and that sort of thing. So from that standpoint, I think it might have been significant. But it's hard to say. That was all just part of the whole package.

LS: I'm just looking at things, but do you have anything, I do have some more questions.

AC: I can't think of anything now.

LS: Was one of the offers, in one of the offers, the educational planning issue was left out. Do you remember that? What happened there? Apparently Feinsinger 01:22:00got a hint that it wasn't, that the TAs really weren't going to insist upon it, and suggested it be left out.

AC: Yeah.

LS: Do you remember that?

AC: Yes, I remember that. I think Nate just misread the signals.

LS: Yeah.

AC: I think that that's all (he was doing?). I remember when it happened. And it was clearly not what they had in mind.

LS: Yeah. Well, who did the mediating? [unclear] have any effect?

AC: Oh, the main thing that it did was it gets people talking again.

LS: So it did have that, it did accomplish that.

AC: Sure. Otherwise, I don't know how long they just sat there and [unclear] on strike and [unclear]

LS: I see. Were you aware that the TAs had deliberately planned the date of the strike so that there would be a week of striking and then a week when everybody would go home early for vacation, and then a week of vacation, and then expected 01:23:00pretty much to--

AC: Yeah. I assume that they had. And I always thought it was a mistake. (laughs)

LS: Oh?

AC: It didn't make any sense to me.

LS: Why? For starting right then, you mean?

AC: Yeah. I thought that the vacation thing sort of screwed up the works for them.

LS: Well they felt that they could then call it a four-week strike.

AC: I see.

LS: That did cover a span of four weeks.

AC: Yeah.

LS: See, they didn't think the students would stay with them longer than a week, really. But the students would go home for vacation. As a choice.

AC: I see.

LS: Was there any way that you would have handled the strike differently?

AC: No, no. I think that the university did about what it had to do. It decided that, it set up the system for determining who in fact was on strike and saying 01:24:00that the people would strike on that date.

LS: What finally [unclear] that? Did they get paid or not?

AC: We had, each department chairman was responsible for determining which TAs [unclear] and which hadn't. And they turned in a report somewhere. And those [unclear] get paid.

LS: Did the university attempt to fire forty TAs? Do you know anything about that?

AC: Not that I know.

LS: Zorn said in his article.

AC: No, that was all [unclear] there wouldn't be any recriminations for the strike. [unclear]

LS: Oh, you noticed, you noticed Feinsinger's remark about Jim Stern being very bitter about--

AC: Yes.

LS: Were you aware of that?

AC: No. No. Well, I knew that it had shaken him quite a bit, because he saw himself as being very close to [unclear] some harsh words [unclear]

LS: And he'd really like to have made some reprisals against Marketti.

AC: That I don't--

LS: You don't know anything about that.

AC: Don't know anything about that.

LS: Was there an attempt on the part of the university to reneg on the health plan, which also was Zorn's--

AC: No. The university's agreement was to ask the legislature for a health plan. And [unclear]

LS: Oh, I see. It was the legislature.

AC: And I guess all along we knew that that was problematical. The legislature 01:26:00was not likely to be very sympathetic to these guys.

LS: Well, there are some, there are a few more minutes. Do you want to comment on the consequences for the campus? Or anything else?

AC: I guess, it's hard for me to comment on the consequences. Because I left the job with the chancellor and been back to the law school where although you had a few TAs, who I never thought of as TAs before [unclear], one consequence here. I always thought of them as legal writing instructors. And they were second and 01:27:00third year law students who worked with the legal writing program for the [unclear] And we found out during the course of these negotiations that they were in fact TAs, and they are now covered by the TA contract. But that's a pretty minor part of our operation as compared to some other things.

So I don't have a very good picture of what's going on in the university generally as far as the consequences of the contract. My impression is that it hasn't changed things dramatically. That there still are roughly the same kinds of jobs being done by TAs. They're being paid a little more. They're, even though they didn't bargain [unclear], you could bargain workloads and minimum, minimum assignments. They had to work at least one-third time. So there are 01:28:00probably a few less TAs making a little more money than there would have been without the contract. I think there probably were some problems in the individual departments. Overworked TAs and people who were treated not fairly. I think that's less true now. [unclear]

LS: I was thinking more of relationship between the faculty and the administration.

AC: I don't think that it's had that significant an impact on that. I guess one of the things that it seems to me that it did was to, was to persuade or to show faculty members something about the extent to which they are employers and sort 01:29:00of the ambivalence of their situation. That the faculty senate, the people in departments that deal with TAs are now fully aware of the fact that they have an employer obligation. That doesn't sit very well with some people. (laughs) For faculty who consider themselves on the other side of the campus [unclear] But it's true. And I think that it may have sort of broadened the perspective of people on the faculty. But what that means in terms of faculty- administration relationships and so forth in the long run, I don't know, for example, if it had an impact on the faculty attitude toward collective bargaining as a faculty. It might have. I'm sure that in individual instances, it did. That there were some people who were involved in collective bargaining with the TAA who came out of that experience saying, "No collective bargaining on this campus [unclear] as 01:30:00far as I'm concerned. This is nonsense." I'm sure there are some [unclear]

LS: Were you among them?

AC: I'm, no. Not for that reason. I have not been a supporter of faculty collective bargaining, but not for that reason. I just think that faculty collective bargaining on this campus would not be to the advantage of the faculty. I think that the faculty here has more to lose than to gain from collective bargaining. I have that view whether [unclear] bargaining.

LS: Yeah.