Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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My op-ed on the end of the strike in today’s YDN is on-line here.

The settlement of contracts at the end of last week was met with the ubiquitous promise in the press of “eight years of labor peace at Yale.” Several years without painful strikes is indeed an attractive prospect. But any lasting labor peace must be build on a foundation of labor justice, just as only a real social contract based on just partnership holds the potential to bring peace to Yale’s troubled relationship with its home city. It’s not by coincidence that the picket chant of “No contract — no work, no peace,” parallels the old protest chant “No justice — no peace.” The message is the same, and holds as true for the next years as for the past weeks.

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This piece in the AP is right to recognize Yale as a politicized and politicizing campus, but does a pretty sad job of trying to explain this phenomenon – mostly evidenced by the writer’s decision not to interview any undergrads about undergrad activism. The expert cited, instead, is Yale’s Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs, Bruce Alexander, who essentially describes vocal leftist students as cute gadflies who bring some color to the campus by taking potshots at Yale to get attention before gearing up to run for Congress. Must be that liberal media, and that liberal university administration, at it again…

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From the Times:

Ending a three-week strike, Yale and its two main unions reached a tentative eight-year contract yesterday that will give many workers raises of more than 40 percent over the life of the pact and provide the embattled university with years of labor peace…

“I’m very pleased with it,” said John W. Wilhelm, president of the hotel employees’ union. “The fulcrum of the agreement is the union agreeing to an unusually long-term contract, which enabled the university to significantly improve some of the terms, particularly the pensions. That’s a good exchange.”

…Under the tentative accord, union officials say, monthly pensions will nearly double, when the 30 percent increase in the pension formula is tied to the sizable wage increases. Throughout the strike, the unions asserted that pensions were too low, saying that the pension for the average worker who retired last year after 20 years or more was just $621 a month…

Under the accord, the clerical workers are to receive raises of 4 percent the first year, 5 percent the second, 4 percent in years three and four, then 5 percent in each of the next four years, with 2.5 percent given each January and each July. With their annual pay now averaging $33,000, this will increase their pay by 44 percent…

The dining hall and maintenance workers are to receive raises of 3 percent in the first year, 3.5 percent the second, 3 percent in years three and four. In each of the next four years, they are to receive raises of 4 percent, with 2 percent given each January and each July. With these workers averaging $30,000 year in pay, the contract would increase their wages by 32 percent over eight years.

The previous contracts expired in January 2002. One of the major issues was whether the workers would receive full retroactive pay for the wage increases. Under the agreement, workers are to receive two-thirds of the retroactive wage increases due them, with a minimum retroactive payment of $1,500…

The new contract includes a 1.5 percent multiplier on the first $30,000 of salary, 1.4 percent on the next $25,000 and 1.3 percent on salary above $55,000…

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At a press conference tonight at City Hall, DeStefano, Wilhelm, Levin, Proto, and Smith announced the settlement – pending approval by workers in votes tomorrow – of contracts for Locals 34 and 35. The details will be released tomorrow after they’ve been seen by those in the bargaining unit – what I’m hearing is that the contracts are very, very good.

Tomorrow we continue the fight for a more just, more progressive, more whole Yale.

Tonight we celebrate and rest.

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Tonight will be the second night the wall of shame Yale retirees set up across from President Levin’s office in a ceremony yesterday will continue standing on Woodbridge. The wall shares the names, years of service, and pension statistics of retirees, including Shirley Lawrence’s mother, who put in decades of service at Yale only to have the University buy out her housing as part of its expansion and gentrification process, leaving her with an unlivable pension and without a home. Shirley has worked at Yale for years and is now an organizer for Local 35; she spoke at our teach-in on Friday and at a moving forum with Yale Union Women held tonight at the Women’s Center. Every member of this community should take the time to stop by the wall and talk to the men and women holding a vigil there – including my peer who wrote, in an article on David Horowitz’s website earlier this week:

A Yale sophomore argued (somewhat unintelligibly) in the Yale Daily News that “To defend a pension plan which left the average Yale retiree of 2000 with a $609 per month pension while proposing to offer Levin a $42,000 monthly pension and investing the rest of the fund is indefensible.” Yet the unions hold out as their examples “victims” who, having worked at Yale less than 30 years, are not long-term workers and, as such, have no right to the full retirement package provided under the current contract.

The full retirement package, unfortunately, isn’t much to brag about either. But don’t take it from me – take it from the intelligible, reputable, and often viciously anti-union YDN editorial board, which acknowleged it in an otherwise unsurprising editorial at the beginning of the strike, or from Richard Levin himself, who begrudgingly agreed the pensions needed improvement after some of the men and women standing across from his office now took over the Investment Office. Better to hear about it from those folks themselves though. And if you ask nicely, they’ll also teach you how to knit.

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Saturday’s rally was an incredible mobilization of support and solidarity, with – by police estimates – over 10,000 workers and students from all over the region and beyond coming together to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the movement for change. Yale students gathered in front of a banner towards the back; the front of the march was already at the Yale Medical school before we started moving. A dramatic presence of Yale undergrads was there to welcome huge students groups from Harvard, Swarthmore, and Columbia, as well as peers from just about everywhere else – including a few students from Florida and California. A significant number of the sixty-odd Internationals in the AFL-CIO were represented, including many more locals than I could count (Philly’s HERE Local 634, where I worked this summer, was out in full force). The strongest felt presences, besides AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, were the leaders of four of the “New Unity Partnership” unions which have been increasingly publicly working together to try to push the AFL to prioritize dramatic organizing for the labor movement’s survival – Andy Stern of SEIU, Bruce Raynor of UNITE, Doug McCarron of the Laborers, and Yale’s own John Wilhelm of HERE – all of whom, with Sweeney and over a hundred others, took arrests for civil disobedience at the close of the march.

Yale’s new PR line, faced with the infeasability, one figures, of telling the press that the rally was not disruptive, or that it didn’t really happen, or that Sweeney probably secretly thinks Yale’s offer is better, is to say that the University was simply a convenient staging ground for a “union recruitment drive” that had little to do with Yale specifically. This is perhaps marginally more convincing than Yale’s contention that Freshman Move-In Day went more smoothly than usual this time around and marginally less convincing than Yale’s recent contention that it had been planning for years to implement proposals to racially desegregate its workforce and unfortunately didn’t get a chance to tell the unions until the day after it was condemned for race-baiting by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Most of the organizing for this march happened over the course of about a week, and the thousands who gathered did so – as demonstrated by their speeches, by their signs, by their stickers – because they want to see justice for the thousands of men and women who make this University function, and for millions of working people in America as well. Like every vital and difficult labor fight, this one has vital broader implications – as did the 1984 strike, when newly organized clerical and technical workers wore buttons asserting that for women to make 59 cents on the dollar compared to men was unacceptable at Yale and everywhere else.

Yale University, and Yale – New Haven Hospital, are the industries – “eds and meds,” as Levin says – which will likely compose an even greater segment of the American workforce – itself increasingly a service economy – in this century. They possess, as my advisor Michael Denning argues, parallel structures, with low-wage service, maintenance, clerical, and technical workers at the bottom of a hierarchy with set-duration apprentice employees (graduate students, residents) in the middle and highly-trained “professionals” (Doctors, faculty) at the top. The prospects for decent contracts at these institutions are tied up in the prospects for economic justice for working people in this country.

The movement here in New Haven – an alliance of service and maintenance workers, clerical and technical workers, teaching and research assistants, students and faculty, and clergy and community, built around common interest and shared vision – represents a cross-section of the labor movement and a microcosm of the broad-based organizing strategies that have historically worked for the labor movement in the country, and that represent its potential to revolutionize this country in the future.

Yale’s relationship to New Haven is a dramatic microcosm of the yawning and deepening economc divide in this country. The United States is becoming a nation of prosperous Yales and struggling New Havens, and the labor movement has a central role to play in reconciling the two. Unlike many employers, Yale cannot feasibly claim that its contracts are restrained by competition from local alternatives or sweatshops, or by the difficulty of remaining financially solvent. And unlike other employers, Yale cannot easily escape or elude the deserved scrutiny it attracts – nationally and beyond – when it spouts the rhetoric of partnership while clinging to the vestiges of feudalism.

YaleInsider has a thorough breakdown of news coverage from the march, and of Yale’s public statements Saturday. Jacob Remes ’02, who came down to march with us, and who has been more skeptical of late of the prospects for victory at Yale, shares his experience of the march here.

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Yesterday thirteen of the strike-breakers Yale’s subcontracted firm had brought in joined Local 34 and 35 on strike. The comany bosses, seeing their workers begin to picket in the lot in Orange CT where they gather to be bused to Yale, called the police and pushed the rest of the workers onto the bus. The sight of the old strikers welcoming the new ones on the New Haven Green, surrounded by students and clergy, was a powerful demonstration that New Haven will continue to come together despite Yale’s short-sighted attempts to divide it – until such a time as Yale should choose to muster its power in the community to work with the mobilization for justice rather than against it.

In the afternoon, United Students Against Sweatshops leaders had a press conference here kicking off a national student campaign to support Yale workers. Well over a hundred Yale students showed up at a teach-in to hear from workers, organizers, students, and faculty about what they’re fighting for.

Today at 12 PM, several thousand workers and students from throughout the Northeast and beyond will be here gathering on the New Haven Green for a 1 PM march to call on Yale to settle just contracts now.

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The subcontracting company Yale’s been using got a surprise this morning when they showed up to the lot in Orange CT where they bus workers over to the University and a dozen of the replacement workers donned “On strike” signs and started picketing. They tried to get the police to push everybody out of the lot, with little success, and ended up going back to home base to choose a new location for Monday. The new strikers are out on the Green now meeting the old strikers; they’ll have a press conference there are 10:30 AM. Once again, New Haven has refused to let Yale’s leadership divide it.

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David Potorti, who lost his brother, Jim, at the World Trade Center, writes today:

Why the rush to move on, absent adequate time for thought, healing and investigation? The past two years have shown us. The vacuum that persists around the events of 9/11 remains a gray area into which anything can be suggested about anyone: that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks; that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi outcast rather than an ally and business contact; that we had no warning of the attacks, and no way of deterring them; that the terrorism that day signaled a millennial clash of civilizations, rather than a crime committed by 19 hijackers; that the air quality in Lower Manhattan was safe, and life should go on uninterrupted; and that only more bombs could prevent the creation of more holes like the 18-acre site that remains so empty and yet so full of innuendo, insinuations and half-truths.

September 11th will serve to fill other spaces as well. On that day–surely no accident–London will be hosting Europe’s biggest arms fair: “Defence Systems & Equipment International,” a global trade show for weapons dealers. Even as I’m horrified by the poor taste, I’m heartened that one of the conferences there will be entitled, “Multinational Defense in a Connected World,” even if the topic seems a few years too late and a few clicks outside of Donald Rumsfeld’s radar.

Yet back in New York, as I descend into the “pit” that day, I will be filling the hole in a different way: with memories of the thousands of people who died there, and the millions of expressions of love they would have brought into this world; with the realization that our losses are linked to the losses of thousands of families around the world, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, who have suffered death, dislocation and economic suffering as a result of terrorism and war; and with the acknowledgement that this space belongs to no one but the victims–all of them–of September 11th.

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Looks like Yale has agreed to the call from the unions and the community for a worker-community-management trilateral comission to take a critical look at racial segregation in Yale’s workforce. This is Yale’s first formal movement at the table since the beginning of the strike, and good news for everyone involved.

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Yet again, behind the rhetoric of partnership Yale’s leadership demonstrates a vision of crass division and stable inequality:

A group of ministers accused Yale University on Tuesday of bringing Latino workers to the campus as strikebreakers to cause racial dissension among picketing maintenance workers.

Two area cleaning firms delivered 40 to 50 Latinos to the Old Campus on Monday, and “paraded” them through a picket line of mainly African-American strikers in Local 35, according to the Rev. Emilio Hernandez.

Hernandez said less than 5 percent of Yale’s workers are Latino, even though they make up 20 percent of the New Haven population. He said the ministers want to increase the presence of Latinos at Yale, but not as strikebreakers, and he accused Yale of trying to arouse racial confrontation.

The ministers said several clergy tried to talk to the workers on Monday, but were asked by police to leave.

Dan Smokler of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, which works closely with the strikers, said Tuesday members followed buses with workers from a company in West Haven to a parking lot in the city’s Fair Haven section, where they were transferred to Yale vans and brought to several of Yale’s residential colleges under security escort. He said the workers were told not to talk with the center’s volunteers or they would lose their jobs…

Julie Gonzales, a junior at Yale’s Silliman College, said she was particularly offended by the hirings. “To see my university use these kinds of divisive tactics is like a kick in the stomach. A university that is committed to diversity should bring people together, rather than trying to break a strike,” Gonzales said.

This is the same strategy ONHSA ally Boise Kimber used in telling Ward 6 voters that Delores Colon represented the Latino threat to Blacks in New Haven. She won that race yesterday.

This is the same thinking that convinced Bartlett Giamatti in the early 80’s that Yale’s predominately Black male service and maintenance workers and Yale’s predominately White female clerical and technical workers would never go on strike together.

This is the grand strategy that Yale has been depending on to crush the unions in this fight – the conviction that once the situation got intense, a coaltion of thousands of clerical, technical, maintenance, and service workers, teaching assistants and researchers, students, faculty, clergy, and community members would fracture quickly. So far, looks like Yale’s leadership has a lot to learn.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is releasing a letter to President Levin condemning Yale’s behavior today.

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I mentioned this story a few weeks back. Gregg Easterbrook of TNR is now asking why this story – Southern Republican Governor, citing Christian imperative, calls for redistribution of wealth from rich to poor – has gotten little play in the mainstream media. I think Easterbrook and I agree that the media has been unfortunately complicit in the co-optation of Christianity in the public political sphere as a bastion of social reaction divorced from its economic progressivism (in other words, it’s time to put the “Worker” back in “Catholic Worker,” or – in Michael Lind’s formulation – put the “Liberal” back in “National Liberal”). Easterbrook suggests that this is because the mainstream media hate Christians. I think the problem is that the mainstream media hate the poor.