Tag Archives: labor

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

My new YDN piece is on-line here. I like it (even without a few hundred cut words). You might too.

To believe that it is Wilhelm, and not the workers who voted overwhelmingly one year ago to authorize a strike, that chose this job action, that it is Wilhelm, and not the workers, who voted overwhelmingly to reject Yale’s offer again last spring, who decides what’s worth fighting for, and that it is Wilhelm’s promotion, and not their own futures for which workers are marching, is to suggest that the workers of Yale lack the savvy to know what’s best for them. This is the attitude that Yale’s leaders have brought consistently to the bargaining table, and that has brought our university to its ninth strike in 35 years.

Posted on by

Photos from the Yale strike are compiled here.

The Times’ latest analysis is here.

In what some call a clash between blue collars and blue bloods, many of Yale’s workers grew up in New Haven resenting Yale, feeling that it symbolized wealth and arrogance. For its part, Yale has a reputation of being inflexible in negotiations, angering many workers.

Yale officials appear convinced that the university is New Haven’s most generous employer and that its workers should be happy with their lot.

Many Yale workers, seeing few other job opportunities in New Haven, believe that the best way to improve their lot is to remain at Yale and fight to improve wages and benefits. “You combine a union that is not uncomfortable with a very public approach to negotiations and using whatever types of leverage it can find, and a university that’s taken a hard negotiating approach and stuck with it for a long period of time, and it’s a volatile mix,” said Richard Hurd, a labor relations professor at Cornell.

He said Yale traditionally had a hard-line bargaining approach that resembled General Electric’s: make an offer and refuse to budge.

Some Yale administrators and students attribute the university’s labor record to one man: John Wilhelm, a 1967 Yale graduate who is president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, the parent of the two union locals on strike. Mr. Wilhelm, widely viewed as one of labor’s leading strategists, came to prominence within labor by leading the drive to unionize Yale’s clerical workers.

“For 35 years John Wilhelm has organized strikes at Yale,” said Helaine Klasky, Yale’s communications director. “This year is no different. He obviously believes that confrontation rather than cooperation is the best way to settle contract disputes.”

I’d be curious if there’s anyone out there who finds the latter explanation more convincing than the former. My take will be in the YDN tomorrow.

Today was the third meeting between Union and University leadership facilitated by Mayor DeStefano.

Thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of our members on strike, we are now meeting with Yale decision makers,” said Local 34 President Laura Smith. “Pensions are a key issue for all of us on strike. It’s time to settle a package that gives us retirement with dignity,” said local 35 President Bob Proto.

It’s about time.

Oh – Akiba Hebrew Academy will open one day late on Monday after a last minute settlement between the union and administrators. Maybe my new place of study could learn something from my old one…

Posted on by

A few personal experiences and impressions of the past 72 hours:

The eight Yale retirees (three of whom had to leave for medical reasons, five of whom held out for the full 24 hours) are real heroes whose perseverance is a model to all of us and whose victory presses the movement forward and raises the bar for everyone within it – and within this community. Their victory demonstrates the combination of strategically savvy and symbolically appropriate tactics, solidarity of workers, clergy, students and community, media scrutiny, organizing strength, sheer numbers, and iron will necessary for a victory like hasn’t been seen here since the ’84 strike. The whole episode, from the moment the eight declared that they weren’t leaving David Swenson’s office without a meeting to the moment that – poised to arrest them – Yale announced that it would instead grant their request, also dramatized both the shameful lengths to which Yale will go to perpetuate injustice and the potential and urgency to save Yale University from the Yale Corporation. The three times I was turned away and/or threatened with arrest by Yale police for trying to enter the Investment Building with hoagies for the retirees – who’d been hold up in the office for hours without food or use of the bathroom for several hours at this point – spoke volumes, as did the necessity for New Haven police to take jurisdiction because my University refused to allow food or bathroom facilities to a few elderly employees who showed up after decades of service to the University to confront the man who’s been quietly investing their pension fund in insider trading rather than in decent pension offers for the next generation of Yale workers. It was the sight of fifteen riot police entering the building to drag out five senior citizens, however, that was most deeply infuriating, and Yale’s last-minute realization that to have them do so would shame Yale’s leadership such that it would become more difficult to carry forward its regressive agenda was small comfort. It’s shameful that when light and truth rear their heads at Yale, Yale tries to lock out the light and starve out the truth.

The TV media did a better-than-usual job of covering the sit-in, in part because it was visual and in part because of Rev. Jackson’s presence. The most salient facts – why the retirees went in, that they won, and that Yale was poised to have riot police drag them out – came across on pretty much all the channels. The print media, including the YDN, was unfortunately dismissive of the drama, giving on average a sentence at the end of an article contextualizing the strike about a successful sit-in calling for a meeting but giving no sense of how or why it happened – or that it lasted 24 hours.

As in the last strike, few experiences are more powerful than walking the lines and talking to workers about why they’re out and what they’re fighting for. There are few ways someone in this city of any political perspective (including, perhaps, readers of this site) could be doing with an hour on a weekday morning than talking to the men and women who, yet again, Yale has forced to the point of challenge and personal sacrifice for lux and veritas. I met a fourth grader who’s walking the picket lines for the fourth time because, he explained, of a very greedy man who isn’t very good at sharing his toys.

Jesse Jackson, Emelio Hernandez, David Lee, and others have brought home over the past few days a point that cannot be emphasized enough: the civil rights movement cannot be separated from the movement for economic justice without destroying the integriy of the movement and insulting the dignity of those who compose it. On day after the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, this point has a particular urgency. It’s strange how much more easily middle class Americans tend to believe that the liberty of bosses is contingent on their right to private property than that the freedom of workers is contingent on their right to wages. A classmate once accused me of disgracing the memory of MLK by wearing a pin with a photo of him at an SEIU 1199 rally (the union he often described as his “favorite union”). When I asked how it was inappropriate to celebrate a photo of an event that actually happened he suggested that MLK must have been caught by coincidence standing in front of an SEIU podium. To say that where a woman can sit on a bus is a moral issue but whether she can raise enough money to feed her family is merely a political question is a convenient but fundamentally unjust contention.

Today was one of the most intense freshman move-in days Yale has seen. The civil disobedience was of a much more serious and more dramatic character than last September, and the picket lines were some of the thickest and loudest I’ve seen here. The UOC gave out several hundred copies of our new pamphlet to freshmen and families, most of whom came off understandably as mostly overwhelmed, confused, anxious, and eager to get more information. Yale forced our table off of Old Campus on the grounds that, in the words of Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg, we were there “to bias freshmen, not to orient them.” Meanwhile, the Office of New Haven and State Affairs had three tables set up trying to get students on board with their agenda of condescension and division by giving our lollipops and tape measures. And the crew team had a thirty foot boat in the middle of campus. Yale police also stopped us from entering dorms to poster; one man told me I wasn’t allowed to enter with the poster I had and when I asked whether I could go in to put up, say, a capella posters, he referred me to his boss, who told me no one was allowed to enter with any kind of poster and then asked to see my posters. When I confronted Dean Brodhead about this he told me that I wasn’t being forced off of Old Campus myself, and so democracy was intact.

As we already knew, Scott Marks is a much better speaker than Jesse Jackson; John Wilhelm is a much better speaker than John Sweeney; Howard Dean is a much better speaker than Joe Lieberman.

Yale’s last minute decision to postpone tomorrow’s freshman invocation, an event which to my knowledge has never been cancelled in the University’s history (including during, say, World War), on the grounds of “the threat posed by our unions,” represents a resounding acknowledgement by Yale that contrary to their publicity, business is not going on as usual here, and the crisis is not under control. John Wilhelm was right to say, of of Yale’s prior claims that hardly anyone was out on strike and there was no disruption, “That’s exactly the problem – you do all the work here, and Yale can’t see you.” He also added that – as Yale’s contract offer makes clear – Yale can’t count. This was abundantly clear when Yale produced statistics purporting to show that strike turnout was low which left out 800 Yale workers – guess where they were? Perhaps one of them was Associate VP for New Haven and State Affairs Mike Morand’s secretary, who despite getting ample exposure to Yale’s side – which Conroy et al claim the union leadership is blinding the workers to – is out on strike.

Posted on by

Yale President Levin recently sent out another letter to the Yale community. There’s little new there – Levin has an old habit of borrowing not only ideas but phrases and even sentences him old speeches (this is part of what made reading his book this summer such a dull experience). Rather than putting together a line-by-line critique, at this point I’ll just suggest places to look for refutations of various parts of his argument:

FHUE on Pensions
YaleInsider on Job security
FHUE on Local 34 wages and benefits in comparative perspective
UOC critique of Culver’s similar March letter
FHUE on their proposal of last Tuesday, on Yale’s response, and on rolling advance threats by Yale

I should add that Levin repeats here the same disingenous, paternalistic message on retroactivity espoused in his explanation at a Master’s Tea in the spring that retroactivity was taken off the table because he doesn’t “believe in rewarding bad behavior”:

In the spring of 2002 the University offered to make salary increases fully retroactive if negotiations were completed by June 30, 2002. We also indicated at the time that if the deadline passed, we would not subsequently offer full retroactivity. Instead, we are offering an immediate bonus of $1,500 when contracts are signed to all workers who were employed when the previous contracts expired in January 2002. More recently hired workers would receive $500.

This offer is consistent with the agreement reached between Yale and the unions in 1996, when all employees received a $500 signing bonus eleven months after the expiration of contracts. We did not offer full retroactivity in 1996 for the same reason that it would be imprudent to do so now: to suggest that there are no consequences to extending contract negotiations far longer than necessary would only encourage protracted bargaining when the next contracts expire.

Never mind that (as Zach has pointed out), taking retroactivity off the table gives Yale an incentive to drag out negotiations, while leaving it on the table gives the unions no incentive to do so. I’d say the remarks above – from the President of the University – demonstrate exactly the attitude towards working people (former Reagan Administration Labor Department Staffer) John Stepp described in his RAI Report – a few months before Yale fired him:

Repeatedly in the assessment interviews, union members expressed their loyalty to the Yale institution. They understand their role as suppliers to, and enablers of, academic life at Yale. Unfortunately, existing management systems, policies and practices have marginalized their services, disincenting and often preventing them from contributing to Yale’s growth and improvement.

“Yale is an elitist institution with disdain for working people.”
“Yale’s ethos of excellence stops at the academic door.”
“I want to scream, ‘This is what I do, ask me! I can help you do it better!'”
“There is very little vertical mixing. Inclusivity, involvement, democracy are foreign to worklife at Yale.”
“Collaborative decision-making, even its mildest form, would be met with an uproar.”

Posted on by

Back in New Haven for the year, and ready to bring some light and some truth to the Yale Corporation. Two and a half days until the strike deadline, and there’s little in the way of signs of movement on Yale’s end. Tomorrow morning at 10:30 will be a press conference calling on Yale to settle or submit to binding arbitration to avert a strike; it’ll be headlined by Connecticut’s own Joe Lieberman. I’ve never wasted many kind words on Joe Lieberman – I think his political record overall demonstrates a lack of courage masked in the rhetoric of bipartisanship and a disturbing conservatism masquerading as “moral clarity.” One of my first posts on this site was a somewhat rambling but earnest criticism of Joe as he prepared to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. One of hte few virtues of a (happily, quite unlikely) Lieberman primary win would be a tremendous organizing spike for the Green party; it would, however, represent the final kiss and death for the Democratic party’s organizing among its base (read: everyone to the left of the DLC), which – as much as some posts here might suggest otherwise – is not something I want to see. All of that said, it should be noted to Lieberman’s credit that while he pursues an agenda in Congress generally deaf to the interests of the American people – including those of us in the Connecticut – he’s frequently lended his symbolic support to much more progressive initiatives here on the local level. Damning by faint praise? Yes (also damning by harsh but deserved criticism). But Lieberman’s support for David Lee’s Yale Corporation candidacy, ECCO’s sustainable housing work, and organized labor in New Haven – while deeply inadequate on the scale of the damage done by his work on the national level – should be noted among the few progessive moves for which he can be credited. Not coincidentally, these symbolic moves at home cost him very little with his neoconservative/ neoliberal sponsors and supporters on the national level.

Posted on by

Yesterday, Yale cancelled negotiations at the last minute, supposedly in order to take their time reviewing the proposal from Locals 34 and 35 Tuesday, which significantly decreased wage demands, scaled back the Local 34 job security language, and dropped proposals on a range of auxillary issues, as well as codifying at the table what was already (especially since they offered binding arbitration) abundantly clear: that 34 (Clerical and Technical Workers) and 35 (Food Service and Maintenance Workers) will settle without GESO (Graduate Student Teaching Assistants and Researchers) or 1199 (Yale – New Haven Hospital Workers). This is after the unions reduced their proposed pension modifier by about seven times Yale’s increase in its pension proposal. This morning, after building up suspense, what did Yale’s negotiators bring to the table? A minor job security improvement that would compensate a select group of workers with a week’s severance pay for every year of work and extend by a few months the time that another subset of the Local remains in the hiring pool after being fired. Yale continues to insist, as it has for months, that it doesn’t want a strike. As the 27th draws forward, those words only become more hollow.

Posted on by

From a piece I had published this month in the Irish Ledger and the Democratic Left on the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides:

This fall, workers, families, clergy, and men and women from throughout the greater Philadelphia area will have the opportunity to participate in a historic mobilization for social justice – the immigrant worker freedom rides, which will bring together hundreds of thousands from around the country to defend immigrant rights from fearful and opportunistic politicians and reclaim the historic moment as one for progress and equality. Starting in late September, buses leaving from ten cities – Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston,
Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami, and Boston – will travel across the country to converge in Washington, DC on October 2 to lobby, and in New York, NY on October 4 to rally for equal rights and reclaim the American dream. The rides have four broad policy priorities: a path to legalization and citizenship, family reunification, immigrants’ rights
at work, and civil rights and civil liberties for all. On the way to the capitol, buses will stop at sites dramatizing our national struggle: cemeteries with unmarked graves for men and women who died crossing the border; factories where management has tried to use immigration status to divide workers and keep them from organizing;
sites where civil rights freedom riders of the 1960’s were gunned down while fighting for civil rights.

Over the past few months, a Philadelphia steering committee has begun planning our city’s role in this incredible project and historic opportunity. Our Philadelphia mobilization will be integral to the national mobilization, and will call attention to the American dream born in our city, to the immigrant legacy of our neighborhoods, and to
the modern struggle of immigrant workers throughout our state. We’re planning a powerful event for September 30, when freedom riders from Boston will be coming through our city, and we’ve already confirmed Mayor Street for the day. We’ll also be sending Philadelphians on buses to lobby in the capital on Thursday October 2, and many more for a several hundred thousand person rally in Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, New York on Saturday the 4th. These freedom rides, modeled on the freedom rides of the 1960’s, present us with a historical opportunity to change national policy and shift the national consensus. On the national level, these rides are the most dramatic
evidence of the historic change in AFL-CIO policy on immigration, from decades of seeing immigrant workers as a threat to jobs to a modern realization that immigrant workers are the natural allies of all working Americans, and that immigration status remains a powerful wedge in the hands of employers only as long as workers allow themselves to be divided. The rides are sponsored by a broad coalition which includes the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Interfaith Committee for Interfaith Justice. We’re eager
for you to participate, both by getting involved in planning with us and by showing up this fall to take part in making history.

Posted on by

Zach reports on the demonstration today by Locals 34 and 35 in response to Yale’s “signing bonus” sham:

Today at noon, hundreds ( Jay Driskell and i estimated somewhere between 300 and 500) of workers in Local 35 and Local 34 gathered in front of woodbridge hall to present president levin with invoices for the retro pay Yale’s stealing from them. The invoices are stamped “past due” and read “Please immediately remit payment of my retroactive salary increase in the amount of $[insert amount here]. This amount represents payment due to me for my loyal, dedicated service to yale… Your offer of $1500 is unnacceptable and insufficient to cover the services rendered. Failure to remit full payment as due will result in further serious action. Levin didn’t have enough respect for the workers – or evidently didn’t feel that the crisis was serious enough – to warrant coming out and talking to people. Instead, he made Nina Glickson stand outside the front steps and collect the invoices of several hundred workers…In the next few hours hundreds more invoices will be faxed in. Negotiations resume at 3pm.

The Yale Daily News (hereafter YDN) is back in business with a, in all fairness, relatively balanced piece on negotiations and the upcoming strike. As is often the case, the biggest fault is in the information that’s missing – this time, first, that while negotiations didn’t restart until August 12, the unions have been calling for intensive negotiations to begin for months; second, that while Yale tripled it’s “signing bonus,” that bonus still represents between 0 and 40%, depending on the worker, of the retroactive pay that Yale removed from the table. Fortunately, the men and women who work at Yale know better than to go by what they read in the YDN. The rest of us in the Yale community should all as well.