At Yale, Unions Sticking Together

As Yale University students pack their bags and head home for spring break today, workers will return to the picket lines for the fifth day in a row.

Though the strike will not continue during the school’s two-week vacation, the university and its two largest unions will return to the bargaining table next Tuesday.

And at a press conference scheduled for today, union leaders are expected to announce whether the strike will resume after the break.

Thousands of strikers have been picketing through bad weather all week, culminating in a rally yesterday that took place on closed-off College Street at the heart of campus.

Picketing turnout was largely unaffected by blizzard conditions, according to union organizers.

Approximately 500 students—many of whom walked out of classes—joined protesters to teach about labor issues in impromptu classrooms on the street yesterday, according to student organizers. Some students from New York University (NYU) and Columbia University also lent their support.

And many labor activists from across the country called or wrote e-mails to the university, including members of Harvard’s Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM).

While university officials denied that the strike—the eighth at Yale in the last 35 years and one of the largest ever at a university—will affect bargaining, the unions have managed to focus local and national attention on their cause.

At a rally yesterday, former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 addressed protesters, the latest in a line of celebrity speakers putting the protest in the national spotlight—and in the front sections of The New York Times and other national publications.

The striking parties—Locals 34 and 35 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) and Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU) District 1199—are fighting for a diverse array of causes, including wage increases and the right of graduate students to organize.

But university officials said they will only negotiate with Locals 34 and 35, Yale’s clerical, technical, service and maintenance workers.

The Strength of the Week

The strike has forced the university to shut down all residential dining halls and students have been issued rebate checks to purchase food off campus.

Many professors have opted to move classes off campus to avoid picket lines and some classes and sections taught by striking teaching assistants have been cancelled.

But many students said they had expected more disruption.

“The strike has been anticlimactic,” first-year Catherine Izard wrote in an e-mail. “There has been almost no interruption of daily life. I have yet to have to cross a picket line.”

The first provision of the contract proposed by Locals 34 and 35 mandates the university’s recognition of any union that can demonstrate majority interest in representation by a union-conducted vote.

By law, the university does not have to recognize new unions until they hold a successful secret election by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The provision in the contract covers major issues motivating the GESO and SEIU strikes—GESO wants to be recognized by the university while the SEIU Local wants to cover about 1,800 more hospital workers.

But Yale spokesperson Tom Conroy said there will be no deal until Locals 34 and 35 drop the provision.

Moreover, the provision would not be binding on Yale-New Haven Hospital, Conroy said, citing an NLRB ruling stating that affiliated hospital workers are not university employees.

But union leaders said they intend to stick together.

“It’s the first time that you’ve had such a diverse group of people all walk out together,” said Anita Seth, chair of GESO and a fourth-year history graduate student.

Though Locals 34 and 35 have more widespread support for their positions, the groups joined forces with graduate students and hospital workers to capitalize on “strength in numbers,” union leaders said.

Locals 34 and 35 “will have a harder time winning...without the graduate student employees,” said Bill Meyerson, a spokesperson for the Federation of Hospital and Union Employees (FHUE)—the unions’ umbrella organization.

Organized Living

The approximately 1,350 GESO members—out of a total of 2,400 graduate students—are striking, though they are not an official union.

The group’s right to organize has been one of the week’s most controversial issues.

Izard, like many undergraduates, said she does not sympathize with organizing graduate students.

“I think GESO is ridiculous,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Frankly, GESO looks like a collection of spoiled brats.”

Graduate student Brennan Maier insisted that organizing was a right of graduate students, an assertion supported by the NLRB.

“Asking graduate students why they want a union so much is rather like asking someone why she wants freedom of speech,” Maier wrote in an e-mail. “We want them because they’re our rights. Period.”

Critics contend that GESO is not democratic—especially in light of the fact that only 482 members voted to strike.

But Seth said the strike vote—decided by a 77 percent majority of those present at the meeting—was made by an “unusually high” margin.

In a precedent-setting Oct. 2000 decision, the NLRB allowed graduate students at NYU to organize.

Though unions at Brown University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania have held NLRB elections, the ballots were impounded due to university challenges. An election at Cornell University failed to garner the necessary majority vote to establish a graduate student union.

But GESO members hope to avoid similar delays by obtaining university recognition before holding an NLRB election.

“We know we have a lot of support for a union on campus, and we’re trying to find a democratic way that would allow us to express that support,” Seth said. “Having an election where the ballots do not get counted will undermine that support.”

Yale President Richard C. Levin—known as a leading figure opposed to graduate student organizing—will likely contest results from an NLRB election, GESO organizers said.

Conroy said the university would not consider the unions’ proposal of letting GESO conduct its own election.

“This is not mandatory, and so we will not consider it,” he said. “It’s an election with one candidate and no debate.”

An NLRB confidential election “free of coercion or intimidation” is the only result the university will honor, he said.

History Lesson

Since the last contract expired, the union and university have been agreeing to stopgap monthly contracts while negotiating for the long-term.

Throughout the week, labor leaders have assailed Yale for its history of contentious labor relations, criticizing the university for not moving from its original wage offer.

But Conroy said the university has negotiated fairly.

“We weren’t going to start from an artificially low number just to say we moved it up,” he said. “They started artificially high...if you start artificially high, it’s not that relevant that you’ve moved.”

But Laura Smith, president of Local 34, said there are “no good contract offers on the table from Yale.”

This week’s strike comes nine months after Yale dismissed John R. Stepp, a consultant from Restructuring Associates Inc. (RAI) agreed upon by both parties and hired by the university to facilitate negotiations.

RAI issued a report on January 14, 2002, just a month before negotiations began, which made three recommendations: union organizing and university growth must be addressed, the university must change its management style and the parties must use a non-traditional negotiating process to address those issues.

The resulting procedure was “interest-based negotiating,” which asks the parties to identify its key issues rather than staking out positions in an attempt to find common ground. RAI trained negotiation teams from both the university and unions in the process.

Though university officials say Stepp was dismissed by late last May after completing his work, union leaders contend that he was unilaterally dismissed.

Stepp could not be reached for comment yesterday.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.