Yale Should Recognize GESO

All is not well in New Haven. Normally, problems at Yale University would be cause for a little bit of Harvard celebration, an excuse for us to engage in some gratuitous gloating over the difficulties of our rival school. But given the serious nature of the most recent problem, a different reaction may be called for.

Last week, teaching assistants in the humanities and social sciences informed the Yale administration that if they do not receive recognition as a union, they will go on strike the week of April 3. These graduate students constitute a large group with an important place in Yale College life, and they need to be recognized as such. The Yale administration should grant union representation to the members of the Yale Graduate Employee and Student Organization (GESO), whose members include a majority of the roughly 1100 humanities and social science graduate students.

Thus far the administration has refused to grant the group recognition as a bargaining unit, and it shows no signs of doing so in the future. As Gary G. Fryer, Yale's director of public affairs, stated, "They [GESO members] know very well that we do not recognize them as a bargaining unit, and we have no intention of recognizing them."

Fryer explained Yale's reason for not recognizing GESO. "They are students principally, not employees, and they are treated as such," he said. But this line of argumentation has its problems. Simply because they are students first and employees second does not mean teaching assistants should lose their rights as workers to organize and seek change.

We do recognize that meeting teaching assistants' demands for better wages is a different and more difficult matter than granting GESO union recognition. Because less fellowship aid is available to them, graduate students in the humanities and social sciences generally have a more difficult time funding their graduate school educations than their counterparts in the natural sciences. Should their wages as teaching assistants rise simply because they receive less outside financial support than graduate students in the sciences?

Graduate school is expensive, and teaching undergraduates will not pay for the entire cost of a graduate education. This is simply a financial reality that all graduate students, including those at universities other than Yale, must reckon with. The situation for teaching assistants at Yale may be especially difficult, as union organizers contend. But the particulars of the situation are not central to the main issue: that the teaching assistants should have the right to unionize.

Recognition of GESO as a bargaining unit would represent an important step forward in management-labor relations at Yale. It may not be the solution to all of the problems graduate students face, but it should certainly help both parties involved in their efforts to work out a more equitable arrangement. Yale University should listen to the united voices of some of its most important workers--its students.