Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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Graduate workers vote to strike:

Graduate students at Yale and Columbia today approved strikes to try to force administrators to recognize them as unions. Students at both campuses voted 82 percent to 18 percent to strike for one week beginning Monday, said Anthony Dugdale, a research analyst at UNITE/HERE, which represents workers in the apparel and textile industries, industrial laundries, hotels, casinos and other businesses. Hundreds of graduate students will not teach classes, host review sessions or participate in research next week. The strike will be the first by Ivy League graduate students since the National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that graduate students at private colleges are students, not workers, and cannot form unions. That decision was a blow to the union movement, as it meant that in order for graduate students to win recognition, university administrators would have to voluntarily grant it – something they have refused to do. Organizers hope the combined pressure of simultaneous strikes on two campuses will help reverse that stance. “By asserting this as one voice, we’re identifying what we have in common: that we should be recognized as legal workers and be respected and given bargaining rights,” said Dehlia Hannah, a philosophy graduate student at Columbia. University officials say their position is unchanged.

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The Center for Economic and Policy Research fires back at the Washington Post:

The Washington Post has criticized us for arguing that there is little point in addressing the projected Social Security shortfall, when rising health care costs pose a much greater threat to the living standards of future generations…The Post is of course welcome to its opinion on political priorities, but we feel the most important issue is that the public has been badly misled on both the size of the projected Social Security shortfall and the inefficiency of the U.S. health care system. This is in large part the result of powerful interests: some who have grossly exaggerated the size of the projected Social Security shortfall, and others who have sought to sideline an honest discussion of our health care crisis. We trust a well-informed public to be able to properly prioritize issues for themselves; our role is to ensure that whatever debate takes place be as fully informed as possible…Social Security’s finances looked much worse in 1965 (two major tax increases were needed in the ensuing two decades) than they do today. So if the current shortfall is viewed as a serious problem, it is at least not a new problem. In 1965, Congress devoted its attention to creating Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start, rather than addressing the Social Security shortfall. This was not necessarily a case of mistaken priorities, in our view. While these are the basic facts that we can all agree on, the Social Security debate is taking place in a different world altogether…Our work has been directed towards giving people an accurate assessment of the size of the Social Security problem…In addition to showing that the impact on future living standards of rising health care costs is vastly larger than the potential impact of higher Social Security taxes, we have also shown that for most workers, rising wage inequality poses a much greater threat to living standards, and the cost of maintaining current U.S. defense policy poses an even larger threat to future living standards. We are not anxious for any of these problems to be addressed in an environment in which the public is ignorant of the basic facts. We also don’t believe that such ignorance is an unavoidable condition.

If the Washington Post, and other major media outlets, made a point of presenting these facts to the public, and calling attention to politicians who misrepresent the facts, the public would be much better informed on these issues. To be specific, when a major political figure says something to the effect that our children or grandchildren will not receive their Social Security benefits, that the trust fund does not exist, or that they will face a crushing tax burden due to Social Security tax increases, it would be appropriate to highlight such comments as gaffes. These political figures, or their representatives, should be pressured to say whether they are simply ignorant of the facts or whether they deliberately intended to mislead the public. Similarly, the Washington Post, and other major news sources, could devote some amount of resources to major national problems that the political leadership might prefer to ignore. Even careful readers of the Post are likely ignorant of the sharp increase in wage inequality over the last quarter century, and how much more that has cost most Americans than any possible tax increase that might be needed to maintain the current Social Security program. Most probably have no idea that we spend nearly twice as much per person as other developed countries on health care, and have worse outcomes. And few would be aware that the Chinese economy is likely to grow larger than the United States economy in little more than a decade, making it quite costly for the U.S. to maintain the world’s strongest military.

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Yale makes its long-anticipated announcement of an increase in its contribution in lieu of taxes to the city:

University and city leaders gathered yesterday in East Rock Park — property donated to the city by Yale over a century ago — to announce that Yale will raise its annual voluntary contribution to the city, giving New Haven an additional $1.8 million this year. This payment will be on top of the $2.3 million the University currently gives voluntarily for fire services, bringing Yale’s contribution for this fiscal year to nearly $4.2 million. New Haven has struggled with fiscal shortfalls its leaders have attributed in part to the city’s large number of tax-exempt nonprofit institutions, of which Yale is the largest. “Yale has been part of this community for three centuries, and today’s agreement, while being a landmark agreement, is nonetheless a reflection of a long tradition of contributions to our hometown,” Yale President Richard Levin said at the press conference. “There are lots of ways that Yale contributes to the vitality of the city, and one important way is to help the city enjoy fiscal stability so that it can provide the necessary services to its citizens.” The new payment — calculated as the sum of the number of dormitory beds and full-time employees at the University multiplied by $250 — is tied to inflation and will also increase if the University expands its student population or labor force. The Hospital of St. Raphael, the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven and Casey Family Services also announced financial contributions totaling nearly $200,000 for this year. The mayor’s office is currently negotiating with Yale-New Haven Hospital about making a similar contribution, and the city will also ask for support from other nonprofits, like Albertus Magnus College.

Given that when the Fair Share Coalition formed a year ago to push for progress on this issue we were told it would be unnecessary and unfeasible, this represents sreal progress and demonstrates the importance of ongoing pressure. Yale still has much, much more to do to fashion a more progressive partnership with the city, including a Community Benefits Agreement between the Hill neighborhood and the Hospital which ensures that everyone with a stake in the result has a seat at the table.

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My speech to the Yale Political Union (yes, I even wore a tie…) tonight:
Thanks for having me tonight. All of us in this university community are going to have important decisions to make over the next week, and I appreciate the chance to add my voice to what I hope will be a constructive debate about how we can best see our shared values better realized by our university.

One of the values which brings us together at this institution is a shared commitment to educational excellence. I’m glad to be able to say that I’ve received an outstanding education to this point at Yale, and it’s one for which I’m very grateful. That’s why many of us, with GESO’s strong support, have fought to make that education a realistic possibility for more students. And it’s why many of us are deeply concerned by trends which threaten to erode the quality of undergraduate education at Yale and at universities across the country.

One of these trends is casualization: the transformation of long-term, well-supported jobs into temporary, insecure work lacking the job security and job benefits of their predecessors. Casualization is a national economic trend in which employers cut costs by disinvesting in their workers and cease encouraging workers’ long-term investment in their work. The casualization of academic work is reflected in the national drop from three decades ago when 80% of teaching was done by ladder faculty to 50% today. Ladder faculty have long-term contracts and opportunities for further advancement or tenure. They’re being replaced with a casualized workforce made up of adjunct professors and graduate employee teaching assistants on whom is shifted an increasing portion of the academic workload. Here at Yale, ladder faculty do even less than 50% of the teaching – more like 30%. Adjuncts do another 40%, and teaching assistants do 30%. That means an hour of teaching at Yale University is at likely to be done by a TA as by a professor with a multi-year contract. Needless to say, this is not the academy some of GESO’s detractors are picturing when they refer to its members as “ruling class” spoiled kids biding their time until accepting tenured jobs on completion of their degrees. Instead, they’re doing the teaching work which in another generation was done by ladder faculty, and discovering on graduating that the jobs they may have hoped for at other universities are being done instead by casual employees.

The trend of casualization poses two challenges: How do we make sure universities maintain enough long-term faculty to provide effective mentorship? And how do we make sure that the casual workers who do a majority of today’s teaching have the support necessary to do the best job possible? Around the country, more and more graduate employee TAs, including three-fifths of the ones teaching in humanities and social sciences at Yale, have decided that the answer includes exercising their right to collective bargaining and union representation. As undergraduates, if we want a university which fosters educational excellence, equal opportunity, and democratic participation, then their fight is our fight as well.

This fight is our fight as undergraduates because until Yale fully values the work of our teachers, Yale cannot fully value our education. GESO is right to call for a living wage for graduate student employees to justly compensate the crucial work they do and to enable them to do it better by removing the necessity of working additional jobs on top of teaching, classes, and research. GESO is right to call for paid teacher training to help graduate student employees become better teachers, for smaller class sizes to facilitate better learning, and for office space in which they can better advise students. GESO is right to call for pay equity so that teaching assistants are not paid less the longer they’ve been teaching, and for a rational system for teaching assignments so that teaching assistants are not needlessly teaching far out of their areas of study.

Just as in the campaign for undergraduate financial aid reform, the issue at stake is both how this institution supports the people who are here and who it is that makes it to Yale in the first place. Those who say GESO isn’t sympathetic because most Yale graduate students are white single men in their early twenties are not only wrong about the make-up of Yale’s graduate school – they’re ignoring the factors which make graduate school a more difficult prospect for others. All of us have a stake in the provision of childcare and dependent healthcare for graduate student employees because TAs who didn’t have to spend significant fractions of their pay on childcare and put their kids on HUSKY would be free to be better teachers, and because addressing these injustices would mean fewer outstanding students and teachers kept out of Yale.

Yale cannot be the global leader or liberal educator which we aspire to make it as long as it draws teachers and students disproportionately from a narrow segment of this country. While every individual brings unique perspective to bear on their work, when the voices of swaths of the population are largely absent the ranges of experience narrow. GESO is right to call for full funding for the Office of Discrimination and Equal Opportunity and a formal impartial grievance procedure for discrimination complaints. And GESO is right to call for greater transparency in admissions, hiring, and retention of women and people of color as a spur to further diversification and integration of our community. Today teaching unfortunately mirrors other parts of Yale’s workforce in that women and people of color are concentrated in lower-paying casualized jobs from which it is difficult to rise into the secure well-compensated positions today dominated by white men.

Because they believe in the best ideals of this university, Yale graduate student employees have been organizing for nearly two decades for policies which better support them, their families, and their students, first as “TA Solidarity” and then as GESO. Over this time, GESO has spurred a series of progressive reforms in their working conditions, from stipend increases to healthcare coverage to the formation of the Graduate Student Assembly. Throughout, GESO has recognized that winning requires more than deserving better – winning requires being organized. Everything GESO has achieved has been won through organizing, by building a platform out of the articulated concerns of thousands of graduate student employees and bringing them together to press collectively for change. It’s because the process of agitating for better conditions demonstrated to graduate student employees the urgency of achieving an institutional voice and a seat at the table that they’ve been fighting for over a decade for a union contract.

In pursuing union recognition, these graduate student employees demonstrate their faith in the fundamental democratic principles which inspire this university in its best moments: that justice is best served when everyone with a stake in the result has a part in the process. In signing union cards, they demonstrate their understanding that their rights are best protected and their interests best furthered when they stand together in calling on Yale to do better, be it Chinese students combating discrimination at Helen Hadley Hall, researchers fighting to make the AIDS drug they helped discover available to poor patients, or parents pushing for childcare they can afford and trust. Three-fifths of humanities and social science TAs have joined up with GESO for the same reasons workers in many jobs in many parts of the country do: To make their work more effective and better supported and their voices better heard and respected.

We’ve come to this point because Yale’s leadership has refused to recognize what everyone from the United Nations to the Internal Revenue Service does: that the thousands of hours graduate student employees spend each day teaching classes, grading papers, and conducting experiments constitute labor critical to the functioning of the university, and the people who do it are a workforce. Whether TAs plan to spend their lives doing exactly the same work, whether they enjoy doing it, and whether they learn on the job are all as irrelevant in considering the legitimacy of this union as they would be were it a union of artists or of supermarket clerks or of carpenters. Equally irrelevant is the question of whether Yale’s graduate student employees are better or worse off than its clerical and technical or service and maintenance workers, who’ve shown far less interest in that question than GESO’s student detractors. Instead, Yale’s other service workers have stood with and sacrificed with GESO throughout, just as Local 35 did in staying out on strike for ten weeks to help Local 34 win its first contract at a time when the image of mostly black male blue-collar workers standing with mostly white female pink-collar workers left most observers in confusion or disbelief. These Yale workers stand with GESO because they know from personal experience that the university is stronger and healthier when the people who do the work of this institution have an organized voice in negotiating how that work happens.

Unfortunately, President Levin has not yet come to that realization. Instead he told undergraduates a month and a half ago that he would rather see GESO strike than have even a meeting with GESO leadership because it would be “less detrimental” to the university. This after a full decade of abject refusal to sit down with the union which has each year won the support of a majority of TAs in the humanities and social sciences to discuss GESO’s proposals for change or to agree to a fair process for a majority to make clear whether or not it wants GESO as its bargaining representative. Unless Levin changes course, I’m confident that tomorrow a majority of GESO’s members will vote to strike for a recognized voice, and I’ll be proud to stand with them next week for changes which realize the great potential of this university.

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Sad news, personally and politically, about the man who has been LWB’s favorite for ’08:

Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat mentioned as a possible candidate for president in 2008, announced Monday that he is getting divorced. He and his wife of 14 years, Mary, issued a statement through Feingold’s Senate office saying, “We are separating amicably and intend to remain very good friends.” The marriage was the second for both. They did not have children together. Feingold, 52, has two daughters from his first marriage. Mary Feingold has two sons from hers. Feingold has built a national following with his work on campaign finance reform, and by casting the only Senate vote against the Patriot Act. He was elected to a third term last fall. Several Web sites have sprung up urging Feingold to run for president in 2008. He has not said whether he will run.

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This letter in today’s YDN is a whirlwind ride through the classics of anti-GESO rhetoric:

The Graduate Employee Student Organization (GESO) is not a union. Let’s not call teaching fellows’ failure to show up for work a “strike” (“GESO issues strike threat,” 4/7). Let’s call it failure to show up for work. Yale should withhold pay from and appropriately punish any TF who fails to do his or her work, just as the University would treat any other of its employees.

Yes, you read that right: Yale should treat TAs “just as the University would treat any other of its employees.” But if they are indeed like any other employees, then don’t they have the right to bargain collectively? And when they organize to exercise that right, isn’t that a union? And when the workers in that union refuse to work in order to bring their employer to the negotiating table, isn’t that a strike? The irony is that were Yale to recognize that its graduate employee teaching assistants have the same rights as other employees, there would be no need for this strike. Jon Fougner continues:

It’s unclear to me how GESO ringleaders regularly work up the gall to hijack section time to propagandize.

Funny thing is, when professors and graduate students who oppose GESO use class time to slam GESO, you don’t hear as much concern from the administration about the sacrifice of academic time. Same when it’s, say, graduate students’ advisors making veiled threats about how union support could destroy their career (more about these tactics, and their relationship to Fougner’s citing the 2003 LOWV vote, in this report). Fougner says:

It’s unclear to me why we should be sympathetic to strikes by the ruling class, whether they be professional hockey players or professional academicians.

Not only are GESO’s members, who work for well under $20,000 a year and in many cases will work in not much more lucrative post-Doc positions after graduation because graduate students like them will be doing the jobs they would have wanted, not the ruling class, but to the extent that graduate school’s like Yale’s disproportionately represent particular slices of the American population it’s precisely because of the absence of reforms like dependent healthcare and childcare which, if Fougner had his way, GESO would have nothing to say about and the YDN would give no coverage:

It’s unclear to me that the News ought to let GESO use its front page as a free megaphone…What is clear is that GESO has accomplished little for its own members, and nothing for real laborers. Indeed, in 2001, while Harvard students were courageously bringing Massachusetts Hall to its knees over a “living wage” for university employees, GESO was opportunistically shanghaiing honest-to-God unions into its shifty, self-serving camp.

GESO has accomplished plenty for its members, who are indeed laborers, as everyone from the UN to the IRS has recognized. One of GESO’s ongoing fights is for a living wage for all Yale employees, a fight in which teachers, researchers, service and maintenance workers, and clerical and technical workers – none of them dupes – have stood together with supporters throughout the city in demanding better.

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Wal-Mart Watch: Maryland demands Wal-Mart provide for its workers’ health security:

Maryland lawmakers yesterday approved legislation that would effectively require Wal-Mart to boost spending on health care, a direct legislative thrust against a corporate giant that is already on the defensive on many fronts nationwide. “We’re looking for responsible businesses to ante up . . . and provide adequate health care,” said Sen. Thomas M. Middleton (D-Charles), the Finance Committee chairman, as the Senate approved the measure with a majority wide enough to survive an anticipated veto. A similar bill has cleared the House of Delegates, and legislators expect to reconcile their differences easily. Lawmakers said they did not set out to single out Wal-Mart when they drafted a bill requiring organizations with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health benefits — or put the money directly into the state’s health program for the poor.

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Vicente Fox successfully denies the Mexican people the right to vote for his most popular opponent:

In a vote that casts doubt on the strength of Mexico’s fledgling democracy, this city’s popular leftist mayor lost a critical battle in Congress on Thursday over a measure that is likely to force him off the ballot in presidential elections next year and could lead to his imprisonment. Hundreds of thousands of people were gathered in Mexico City’s central square throughout the day to protest the action, a rare proceeding known in Mexico as a “desafuero,” in which Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador was stripped of his official immunity so he could stand trial in a minor land dispute.

In terms of political rights, the Mexican Constitution holds suspects guilty until proved innocent, so Mr. Lopez will be banned from politics until the end of a trial. Legislators in the 500-member Chamber of Deputies began debating the charges about 10 a.m. in a scathing session that continued uninterrupted until the evening, when the vote was held. Of the 489 who attended the session, 360 favored lifting the immunity, 127 were opposed and there were 2 abstentions. Political analysts said that the proceedings were a critical test in this country’s transition to a full-fledged democracy that began just five years ago when Mexicans broke seven decades of single-party rule with the peaceful election of Vicente Fox, the first president to come from an opposition party. The protests, which had largely ended by late Thursday, brought comparisons to the recent pro-democracy demonstrations in the Ukraine that helped lift Viktor A. Yuschenko to power. But while Mr. Lopez said support for him would grow, his adversaries seemed confident the protests would die out soon.

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What compassionate conservatism has wrought:

As employees continue to absorb more of their healthcare costs, an increasing number of people – even healthy ones – are drastically altering their lives simply to hold on to their insurance. They are delaying homeownership, putting off saving for their children’s education, or otherwise sacrificing their financial security to guard against a catastrophic medical bill. Many people, especially lower and middle-class workers and the chronically ill, are beginning to spend a once-unimaginable share of their income on health coverage. In some cases, health costs have become the single biggest expense in family budgets. Between 2000 and 2004, the number of people spending more than 25% of their earnings on healthcare – a figure normally associated with homeownership – rose by nearly a fourth to 14.3 million people, according to Washington, D.C. based Families USA, a healthcare advocacy group. Over the same period, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, health premiums rose an average of 59%; federal data show the average employee’s earnings rose 12.4%.

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GESO announces majority support among teachers in the humanities and social sciences and among students enrolled in those departments, and a strike vote on April 13:

Despite the threat, university officials said they would not reverse their long-standing policy against union recognition. If, as organizers expect, the strike is approved April 13, graduate students would not teach classes for five days beginning April 18. Organizers believe graduate students need a union to help them negotiate for better wages and health care…Reynolds said students are not considering a grade strike, in which undergraduate grades would be withheld. Such an effort failed in 1995 failed after Yale told students they would be ineligible to teach the following spring if the strike continued.

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Xiaoye Li and Zhengming Fu on the challenges facing Chinese graduate students in Helen Hadley Hall:

For example, one of our Chinese colleagues moved out of the dorm midyear, found a replacement for her room as required by the rules and asked for her rent money back. She was told that she would get no money back, because her “replacement” had applied independently for a room, and so did not qualify as her “replacement.” This meant a potential loss of thousands of dollars. She had to protest, causing management finally to return everything except about $300. They have never explained why $300 was kept. There are no rules about this. It relies simply upon the whims of the housing manager. Last May, there was a major water leak in my room, just before I, Xiaoye, left for a trip home. I loaned my key to a friend so he could protect my belongings. But loaning out keys is prohibited, so the dorm manager sent me an e-mail that said my room “will be re-assigned to an incoming student” and demanded, “You must let me know when you will be available to remove all your belongings from the building.” I found this very threatening and stressful. By contrast, the non-Chinese residents are treated leniently and do not have the rules so strictly enforced on them. Furthermore, when we want to publicize Chinese events, we sometimes put up posters in Chinese, which are always removed immediately. English posters are allowed to stay up. We looked for rules about posters, and there are none. We asked and were told that we must post our signs in both Chinese and English. We did this. Still the Chinese posters are removed, while the English signs are allowed to stay. These are just a few of the many troubling stories we have heard and experienced…

If the residents of the graduate dormitories were allowed to elect representatives who made and enforced the rules, we would have fair rules which protect the comfort and convenience of all the residents. Instead, we have all types of unfair or unwritten rules being made up by a single dictator. This needs to change now! We have found that there is only one way to make these changes: Organize. Organize. Organize. We tried speaking politely with the administration, and nothing has changed. So now we, together with our union, GESO, are standing up to demand respect. It is hypocritical of Yale President Richard Levin to push for greater political democracy far away in our home country of China, while he himself refuses to allow democracy on his own campus, where Chinese students are treated like second-class citizens. He should stop taking advantage of us by charging us high rents for shabby rooms with unfair conditions. He should also stop refusing to recognize the 60 percent of teaching assistants who want a union. He should recognize us, and recognize our union.