Tag Archives: labor

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This front-page story in the YDN focuses on the committee formed in Local 35 which will consider fines – along with other approaches, like new organizing approaches – as a response to the 1 to 2 percent of the membership that continued working during the strike. It’s quite similar to a story the YDN ran a couple weeks back on the same topic, also as a top story. What’s missing is a conversation with any of the hundreds of members who’ve pushed for a response; their absence contributes to the sense that setting up a committee is some kind of autocratic punitive stratagem by Bob Proto. That sense, and the erasure of workers from the narrative, are furthered by the absence of any mention of Bob Proto’s uncontested re-election as President of Local 35 yesterday, or of the race for Chief Steward.

Also misleading is this front-page analysis which continues the YDN’s narrative of GESO of late: GESO sinned by organizing and was punished by losing the referendum last spring, and has since redeemed itself by pushing issues instead. While this account has meant some less openly nasty coverage of GESO by the YDN of late, it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the labor movement works, one shared by too many students. Unions don’t choose between pushing issues to make members happy or organizing to make their leaders happy. Unions organize by bringing workers together through common experience and interest and shared issues, and unions bring change on issues through the power of their organizing. GESO has, as the YDN acknowledges, been responsible for substantive change in the benefits and resources Yale makes available to its graduate students. But only through the power of its organizing, and the threat of unionization. So while it’s true, and admirable, and GESO has conducted an exciting series of surveys, produced damning and enlightening reports, and generated its first unified platform over the past months, pushing for change on the issues which affect graduate students is not a new development – and organizing and fighting for recognition are not only old news.

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The most telling part of this piece in today’s Times is the end:

And even some who oppose the union drive acknowledge that both sides bear responsibility for the current climate.

James Terry, president of At What Cost?, a campus group opposed to the union, said that the university had grown increasingly inflexible on labor issues and that he was among many on campus who have been alienated by the stubbornness and language of union organizers.

“They have some intrusive recruitment tactics,” Mr. Terry said, adding that a graduate student he knows was approached by organizers about membership nine times after she initially refused. “I don’t think that Yale is treating us so bad that we need to compare ourselves to Birmingham in 1963,” he said, “and that’s what GESO will do, and I find that personally offensive.”

Still, even union opponents like Mr. Terry see some cause for alarm in the suggestion that some students, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened if they speak out. “There is reason to be concerned,” he said. “The academy runs on different precepts. Differences of opinion have to be respected. If even one of these cases should be true, that’s something people at all universities should be concerned about.”

Terry’s first comment sets forth the tired dichotomies that GESO opponents of all backgrounds have relied on: between a historical epoch in which real injustice existed and a modern period of mere political differences; between poor sympathetic workers who have the right to organize and wealthy sheltered ones who don’t. But his more interesting contribution, following At What Cost’s line before the Academic Labor Board, is his politically smart refusal to defend the intimidation tactics of Yale’s administration. AWC has also declined to endorse Yale’s stonewalling through refusal to meet with GESO and refusal to agree to acknowledge even the results of an NLRB election. As long as AWC wants to frame itself as a grassroots operation interested solely in democratic deliberation (a difficult mantle to take on, even if all the charges nationally of faculty members making illegal contributions to such groups are true, simply because AWC is benefiting in fighting GESO from the pressure power of the entire University apparatus), it saves face better this way. But it leaves the Yale administration, in its most aggregious violations of its own principles – intimidation of students and refusal of the right to a vote – without any semblance of student support.

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Read about the clerical strike at the University of Minnesota here. As at Yale, the University is claiming large numbers reporting to work; as at Yale, it looks like administrators are seeking numbers complementary to an ideology which makes working people disappear. As at Yale, hundreds of classes are moving off campus, and students are deeply involved in solidarity with the larger community to call for a resolution to the crisis and a better future. As one wrote:

Bruininks and the University administration are trying to pit students against striking workers. With media complicity they’ve attempted to paint the strikers as isolated and weak, while in reality student, faculty, and community support has been growing exponentially in the last week. Come show the administration, the media, and especially the clerical workers how much support they really have! Come demonstrate that students won’t fall for divide and rule tactics, and that we understand unity between students and workers is necessary to confront an arrogant administration trying to make us shoulder the burden of the budget crisis.

Amen.

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Earlier this week, William Sledge, from his perch as Master of Calhoun College – a spot that puts him in loco parentis for one twelth of Yale’s student body – having already donated $250 to Ward 1 Aldermanic candidate Dan Kruger, took to the pages of the YDN to vilify current Alderman Ben Healey for supporting the removal of arrest powers from the constables at Yale – New Haven Hospital, who are accountable not to the city but to the Hospital Board, in response to a pattern of that Board using the constables not to protect patients but to arrest leafletting staff. Sledge, who serves as Medical Director of YNHH’s Psychiatric Hospital (that he serves as Calhoun Master while otherwise employed not by the University but – since it was subcontracted last year – by the Hospital further disproves the argument that the two institutions are discrete), argued that Healey’s move to defend patients and workers from illegal, counterproductive, and unjust abuses of the constable power,

reflected a strong bias towards meeting the goals of the union and indicate that his activity as an alderman is driven by an ideology that is so strongly pro-labor that it overwhelms matters such as the security of those he represents. This bias gets in the way of clear thinking and inhibits the political and administrative imagination required to work out creative solutions.

Alek Felstiner, who witnessed the arrests last year, ably and resoundingly refutes the argument here.

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This editorial from the new board of the YDN repeats the usual anti-union catechism: GESO is ideologically “tainted,” dangerously “single-minded,” and suspicious for its concern with, say, the job security of graduate students. It also suggests, falsely but popularly, that arguments against casualization of academic labor – the transformation of teaching jobs into low-wage, no-security, short-term positions – are about impugning the quality of graduate student and adjunct teachers, rather than about improving their conditions, lessening their workload, and brining in more ladder faculty to contribute to the academic work of the University. Even the YDN Board, however, is forced to conclude that GESO’s new report on casualization, “Blackboard Blues,” raises urgent issues that undergraduates would do well to be aware of and speak out about, and about which Yale’s administration has been suspicously silent. As the Board writes:

TAs don’t replace good professors, and an overreliance on visiting faculty can create a revolving-door of professors that leaves students in the lurch. Visiting professors should supplement full-time professors, not replace them. These concerns warrant a critical examination of the role of non-tenured faculty, and we are disappointed the academic review did not include one. We urge the administration to expand tenure opportunities or consider ways to increase institutional support for deserving faculty. At the same time, however, the contributions of our non-tenured faculty should be recognized.

UOC undergrads and GESO grad students hosted a forum this weekend to discuss this issue with visiting parents, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. We’ll be bringing those conversations to parents’ homes around the country in fora next month. Check out the schedule here.

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Hundreds rallied outside of the Albertus Magnus College office of the school’s President, Julia McNamara, who serves as the Chair of the Board of Yale – New Haven Hospital. The energy was real strong, and the cause imperative. Everyone who was there realizes that the fight goes on to get these 150 workers contracts, and Locals 34 and 35 will not soon forget the solidarity that brought us a win and that will will make us keep winning until Yale comes to internalize the extent to which its self-interest is tied up in that of this city and this movement. As the YDN reported:

“The members of our unions know, and Yale knows, and New Haven knows that we have unfinished business at the hospital,” Smith said. “It’s justice, it’s equal treatment, it’s treating people with respect for the hard work they do every day.”

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Nathan Newman offers a new report on declines in unionization by state, and makes – by ranking states by unionization and coding them by 2000 election results – what should be a succinct, compelling, and visceral arguments for why progressives should prioritize unions and unions should prioritize organizing so that both can build over the next decades.

Much of the recent coverage of the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides has contextualized them as a last-ditch effort by an anemic American labor movement to scrounge for new members and national attention. They’re right perhaps to the extent that a departure from the priorities and strategies of the old CIO bears partial responsibility (along with hostile governments, destructive international trends, and such) for the weakening of American labor over the past few decades. What the corporate media tends to miss is that what the rides represent, as much as anything else, is a historic return to the values and approaches which have brought every triumph that labor has acheived – organizing the unorganized, whoever they are, wherever they work, and building durable coalitions based on common interest and shared vision. Has a sense of crisis in the AFL-CIO played a role in making the “old guard” receptive to the focus on organizing and political mobilization that Sweeney – who won the first contested race for his post in a while – and even more so the “New Unity Partnership” – represent? Certainly. But they stand for is an old idea, not a new one, and in returning to it, the AFL-CIO is only catching up with the locals that compose it.

This is the future of the labor movement.

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The most telling moment in Paul Bass’ latest follow-up on the Yale strike is his account of Levin’s attempt to field his question:

The road to a settlement proved that strikes do work. At least at Yale. Levin insists the two sides could have come to this agreement without a strike.

“Had we been able to sit down” sooner in a “small group” holding serious negotiations, the deal would have come sooner, he says.

But for a good year before the strike, union leaders argued that Levin, or another high-ranking administrator, needed to appear at negotiations for real progress. Levin denied it. Then, on the eve of the strike, he showed up at the table–and kept returning over 23 days, helping to crunch numbers and work toward compromise.

Asked whether he would have shown up without a strike, Levin at first offered pause and no answer. Then he said, “At the right time and place, I would have been there.” But before the strike, he denied repeated requests to do just that.

Actually, at a Master’s Tea in March, he told a group of undergraduates I was in that calling on him to come to the table was ridiculous. Once more, here’s hoping next time Yale’s leadership has an easier time recognizing the real interests of this University – and their resonance with the interests of this community.

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A surreal moment, courtesy of the Badger-Herald:

For Yale sophomore Josh Eidelson, who has worked with the Undergraduate Organization Committees to educate fellow students about the strikes, the new contracts represent progress on various fronts, something the campus community is gladly accepting.

“Decent contracts are vital to create a university community I want to live in. It’s safe to say there is a tremendous sense of relief on both sides” he said. “Everybody that I know is glad to have a sense of peace in the immediate sense.”

Nonetheless, Eidelson feels that for labor relations to improve, the New Haven community, administrators and union members must all take progressive steps together.

Although he feels Local 34 and 35 could have been handed more benefits, he still sees the contracts as “a positive show of greater faith in a foundation of future progress.”

Conroy also sees the settlements in a similar light.

And here you thought Yale’s PR team and I couldn’t see eye to eye on anything…

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Today marked my first time back in Yale’s dining halls this semester. It was a triumphant, emotional experience. I shared hugs with several of the workers in my residential college, and I wasn’t the only one. And the food, despite Aramark’s cut backs since they took over, is real, real good. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

I won’t rant here about the settlement, since I already linked a (long) piece I wrote on it today. I’ll just write here that a settlement which doubles pensions and protects job security (and, in one of many less-noted improvements, undoes Yale’s silly and elitist policy of only granting tuition assistance for four-year universities) is a win for everybody here, a tremendous victory won by a tremendous movement despite tremendous opposition. And there’s much, much more ahead.

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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.