The YDN covers GESO’s advocacy over the past week:

More than 300 graduate students signed a GESO diversity grievance this week asking Yale to increase its financial commitments to diversity programs and create an independent grievance committee on diversity and equal opportunity. GESO members also protested, urging the University to balance the stipends teaching assistants receive regardless of their status at the Graduate School.

Currently, teaching assistants before their fifth year are paid $16,000 stipends, but teaching assistants in their fifth year and beyond receive $12,530, according to GESO’s pay equity grievance.

And mentions the plight of someone you’ll be hearing more about:

Chemistry professor Connie Allen, a GESO supporter who said she was one of the only black teachers in Yale’s science departments, said she was laid off in December due to the current budget crisis. She had taught at Yale for four years.

“If teaching excellence and diversity mean something to Yale, there’s really no reason why my contract should not be renewed,” Allen said. “I do think it’s important for freshmen to be able to see diversity — and know that succeeding in the sciences is possible.”

As someone who sat in an open forum last spring at which Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead asserted that Yale is doing everything it can to hire and retain faculty of color, but that there just aren’t enough qualified candidates, I find Yale’s treatment of Professor Allen that much more absurd.

Yale – New Haven Hospital’s dietary workers in 1199 approve a contract with management:

In a vote of 68-4 Tuesday night, the unionized dietary workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital chose to accept a new contract with the hospital, bringing a partial conclusion to this stage of the struggle between the parties, which has been ongoing since January 2003.

A hospital spokesman said Thursday that the institution is pleased that the contract was settled and believed the new deal — which the union said is largely the same as the previous contract between the parties — was fair and reasonable. But officials of both Service Employees International Union District 1199, which represents approximately 150 dietary workers, and Yale’s unions said the workers had not achieved what they wanted. “It’s not the contract they wanted or deserved — it’s what they could achieve under the current conditions,” District 1199 Spokeswoman Deborah Chernoff said. “It’s a somber reality. They’re proud they stuck together and moved the hospital a little.”

Ana Munoz on the commodification of Latin American poverty:

Just as the developing world should not serve as a strip mine of natural resources and temporary labor for the United States, it is also inappropriate to see the bulk of our hemisphere as a kind of spiritual getaway, a place for stressed Americans to rediscover their souls when momentarily faced with staggering indigence and social injustice.

The problems faced by Nicaragua and the rest of Latin America are not simple, they are complicated, and to treat them at all otherwise is both disrespectful and disingenuous. I certainly laud Reach-Out’s efforts to connect Yale students with a foreign country whose daily struggles result in part from an intimate history with American imperialism. But if we react to the reality of our neighbor’s battles with wide eyed awe at its primitive topographical, economic, and political landscapes, we might as well call-in Captain Kurtz because as much as we may hope to ameliorate the Americas’ current predicament, we will only end up perpetuating it.

In These Times on feminism and race:

The “browning” of America has yet to serve as a wakeup call for feminist organizers. Attempts to address the racism of the feminist movement have largely been token efforts without lasting effects. Many young women of color still feel alienated from a mainstream feminism that doesn’t explicitly address race. One woman of color, who wishes not to be identified and is working with the March for Women’s Lives, put it this way: “We’re more than your nannies and outreach workers. We’re your future.”

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a Toronto-based spoken-word artist, sees race as a central part of the work she did in counseling women who have suffered from sexual abuse and racism. “You can’t deal with the abuse and not the colonialism,” she says of her work with Native American women. Healing, she adds, can often mean reconnecting to cultural pride.

The picture that cost Tami Silcio her job:

Matt Bivens:

…that’s the subtext of even the Labor Department’s lame little press release: It turns out workers were suffering “confusion” about their overtime rights and that this was “generating wasteful class action litigation.” The press release quotes Secretary Chao as saying, “With the ?FairPay’ rule”– yes, they’ve even focus-grouped up another catchily misleading label, a la “Healthy Forests” or “Clear Skies” — “With the ?FairPay’ rule, we are restoring overtime to what it was intended to be: fair pay for workers, instead of a lawsuit lottery.”

…As to that lawsuit lottery, these new rules transform it into a full-blown mafia-run casino…

Shameful:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted Thursday to allow employers to reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they become eligible for Medicare at age 65.

The agency approved a final rule saying that such cuts do not violate the civil rights law banning age discrimination. The vote was 3 to 1, with Republicans lining up in favor of the rule and a Democrat opposing it.

The AARP is on the right side of this one:

A preamble to the final rule says it “is not intended to encourage employers to eliminate any retiree health benefits they may currently provide.” But Michele Pollak, a lawyer at AARP, said that might well occur.

“This rule will allow employers to reduce or eliminate retiree health benefits for anyone over the age of 65,” Ms. Pollak said. “More than 12 million Medicare beneficiaries currently receive retiree health benefits from employers and could potentially be affected.”

The NEA, alas, is standing on the wrong side, and sounding too much like a craft union for my tastes while doing it:

Alfred Campos, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, praised the rule, saying, “It will encourage school districts to continue providing health insurance to retired teachers under 65.”

I’m afriad that any retired teachers under 65 who believe the NEA is protecting them by letting their older peers’ benefits get slashed are in for a rude and undeserved awakening ahead.

The Sierra Club membership demonstrates its recognition that immigrants are not the problem:

After weeks of highly publicized warnings that anti-immigration outsiders were trying to take over the venerable Sierra Club, the club’s members on Wednesday overwhelmingly supported all five candidates put forward by the group’s formal nominating committee.

The three candidates whose participation became the focal point of the controversy were former Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado, a prominent critic of immigration policies; David Pimentel, a noted Cornell University entomologist; and Frank Morris, the former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. But the three finished at least 95,000 votes behind the winners, placing 11th, 12th and 15th in the race that had a total of 17 candidates for the five three-year terms.

A first-year at Yale Forestry School writes about the impact of tuition debt on students:

My involvement with local groups and communities has provided many important lessons on resource control and the inequalities of decision-making regarding their use. After graduation from Yale I would like to return to Ecuador or be involved from the United States, perhaps working for an NGO. But I fear it won’t be possible for me to continue this work — work I have trained for at the environment school. My decisions after I graduate will be guided primarily by my debt. In order to pay off my loans by the time I am 50 I will have to take a job ill-suited to my interests and training. I fear I may end up a consultant to those who want mine Intag’s rocks, instead of asking how mining the cloud forest can even be called “development.”

Benita Singh:

…so long as the University treats sexual violence as a marginal issue rather than a real and pervasive problem, students will have the same perspective.

I’ll be there – will you?

The “March for Women’s Lives” this Sunday will be led by a coalition of seven women’s and civil liberties groups. They are the National Organization for Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the Feminist Majority, Naral Pro-Choice America, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The march is also endorsed by more than 1,400 other groups, including unions and religious and health care organizations.

“This is, to us, just a beginning,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority. “We are going to make women’s rights, and especially reproductive rights, another third rail of American politics, just like Social Security. This is no longer going to be a political football debated every two or four years.”