Volume 28 - Issue 4

The~wJournal P u BLISHE R

Audrey Leibovich EDITOR- IN- CHIEF

Suzanne Kim MANAGING EDITORS

!Vztherine Bel/ !Vzte Schuler DESIGNER

Harling Wong PRODUCTIO N MANAGER

Gabriel Snyder PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Brendan Koerner CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

joshua Civin Assoc iATE P u BLISHER

Min Chen Assoc iATE EDITORs

Benjamin Lumpkin Hillary Margolis REsEARcH DIRECTOR

Kilren jacobson CIRCULATION AND SuBSCRIPTION MANAGER

Dan Murphy Akc Bnnis"' • Katie Brandi • john BuibJclc joel Burges • Brooke Conti • jay Dixit Marie Neuman• • Ann Skdge "ekcud to staffFebruary 4. 1996 Members and Directors: Constance Clement Peter B. Cooper • Brooks Ketley • Patricia Pierce Jay Porter • lUthy Reich • Fred Snebeigh Thomas Strong

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F E A T U R E S _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __

5

A Brief History of Labor at Yale: A Timeline

8

Cramped Quarters: Inside Federation Politics

BY TEo G ESING

A resilient union alliance emerges from the close confines ofan office on College Strut.

BY GABRJEL SNYDER

13 14 16

Perspectives on Work at Yale: A Photo Essay

BY WHITNEY LAwsoN

John Sweeney on Labor The New Journal talks to the president ofthe AFL-C/0.

WITH DAN M uRPHY

Blue Collar or Blue Blazer?

GESO wrestles with a question ofidentity during its struggle for fair treatment of teaching assistants.

BY J oEL BuRGES

20

The ABCs of Student Activism An alphabet soup ofstudent organizations attempts to combat apathy on campus.

BY ALEc BEMIS

24

Beyond 59( Feminism: Local 34 Since '84 The union's initial focus on women's issues gives way to new challenges.

BY KATHERJNE B ELL AND SUZANNE KIM

A Formal Response to Casual Labor Amid administration and union propaganda, casual workers voice their own opinions about labor conditions.

BY KAREN JACOBSON

s 'VV&AT

B'.lll: p. 24

WORTR

T A N D A R D 4

6 30

s

About this Issue Points of Departure Afterthought: After the Grade Strike BY MICHAEL DENNING.

Cover photo by Marisa Galvez/ Th~ Ntw ]oumlll Cover design by Gab rid Snyder.

TJ.. N<~~J ]tntnutl is publ~ five times during the aademic year by 11w: New Joum.J at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box HJ1 Y.Je Station, New Haven, cr o6s10. Officx address: 151 Park StreeL Phone: l1o1> 4J1-19S7- All COntents copyright 1995 by The New Journal at Y.Je, Inc. All Rigbu Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in pan without writtcn permission of tbc publishcr and editor in chief u prohibited. While this mogaUnc is published by Yalc Collcgc studcnts, Y.Jc University is not responsible for its contents. Ten thousand copies of tach issuc arc discribure<l frcc to mCJJibcrs of the Yale and New Havcn community.

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The 1984 drive for union recognition marked a watershed moment in the history of labor relations at Yale, a time that hangs over us today as a specter of former glory. This year's negotiations, while less glamorous than the universal fight for women's rights, has been no less dramatic. We have devoted this special issue to discussing the complexities of the 1996 negotiating table. The difficulties emerge even more saliently against the background of the labor movement on a national level as well as at Yale.

Labor activism at Yale over the past 15 years has coincided with a downward turn in the fortune of the movement nationwide. Corporate strategies focused on building cooperative relations between management and labor have arguably all but diminished the power of unions.

Those wedded to the direct action approach for labor organizing have scoffed at management teams made up of workers in America's corporations. At stake is the future of unions' bargaining power during a time when corporations seem increasingly resistant to collective worker identity. Labor's strongest national voice, the AFL-CIO, has had to assess its role in reviving the labor movement. In this issue, Dan Murphy talks to AFL~CIO president John Sweeney to discuss his views on the future of labor activism and its impact on the current circumstances at Yale.

As a university, Yale's relationship to its workers differs from that of corporations not bound by place or tradition. While other corporations can relocate in response to financial pressures, the university is much more rooted in its space. Yale's relationships with students, faculty, and workers is steeped in a tradition many would call paternalistic. Katherine Bell and Suzanne Kim focus on the political appeal of the clericals' and technicals' drive for union recognition in 1984 and contrast it with today's union agenda, which has strayed from its original feminist stance.

This year's negotiation struggle shows what happens when the field of bargaining opens up to the issues of race and class, in addition to gender. While gender predominated in 1984, this year, Locals 34 and 35 have had to grapple with added layers of worker identity. Yale's own preeminent labor historian David Montgomery writes in Th~ Fall of th~ Hous~ of Labor, "Although the personal bondings of families, migrant groups, young wage-earning women, craftsmen, strikers, voters, and rioters defined people's loyalties in different and often conflicting ways, all attachments were rooted in the shared presumption that individualism was appropriate only for the prosperous and wellborn." The collective actions of Locals 34 and 35 have challenged such presuppositions. Gabriel Snyder enters the actual office space shared by Locals 34 and 35 to speak to the complexiry of building a coalition that is both politically representative and viable. Locals 34 and 35 have been trying to open up the terms of collective worker identity to include such previously marginalized groups as casual workers. Karen Jacobson compiles a dialogue of two casual workers' stories to contrast the administration's hard line. GESO has entered into the debate quite stridently by struggling to define teaching assistants as workers, challenging conventional notions of work in the university. Joel Burges analyzes GESO's relationship to a university resistant to recognizing it at the bargaining table. In an Afterthought to the issue, Professor of American Studies Michael Denning contends that the end of the grade strike does not mark total defeat for GESO, whose concerns will continue to prevail.

In his book ~rk, Cuitur~, and Society in Industrializing America, labor scholar H erbert Gutman writes about workers' power to affect the development of their larger culture and society. A study of labor at Yale necessarily leads us to the impact that these struggles will have on the current state of labor affairs on the national level, especially in universities. Workers at Yal~om Locals 34 and 35 to casual workers and GESO--have the ability to change their roles in this university and at others. In a sense they are negotiating the terms of their working present and creating institutional history, a story that will speak to workers' movement after and beyond Yale.

THE NEW JouRNAL

a brief of labor janitors, maids, maintenance, and power workers to organize under United Construction Workers Union.

Yale maintenance and service workers strike to protest managerial policies.

Yale maintenance and

Design by Ted Geslng

5

A Tale of Two Tiers I know how a lot of Yale employees feel when they talk about not being respected by their employer. For the past two summers I've worked as a building janitor, a member of New York's Local 32B-32J of the Service Employees Union. I performed all your basic janitor tasks, like sweeping, mopping, moving furniture, and emptying garbage. For the most part, my co-workers and I were all treated with disdain by the "tenants," the executives and secretaries working in this Manhattan office building.

Once these tenants found our that I was a Yale student, however, I meri.ted a kind of pseudo-respect. Though at first I was judged ignorant and lazy because I was a janitor, as a Yalie, I was immediately labeled trustworthy and brilliant. I was asked to help with computer problems, I was paid under the table to proofread business proposals, and I was even given box sears at a Yankee game to go out with a secretary's niece.

My fellow janitors were generally not very well-educated. Some were dropouts, while some had done a few semesters at college. Working 40 hours of straight time, I netted upwards of $500 a week. For me, that money meant I could buy my own books, beer, and food while putting something away for the future.

For all my coworkers, however, it meant that they could just barely keep their families in the lower middle class.

I probably won't do the same job this summer because it won't be worth it. The building managers proposed a two6

tier wage system, similar to the one proposed at Yale, and I would fall into the second tier. That would mean that like all new hires, my pay and benefits would be set up on a lower scale. It might nor be worth cleaning garbage cans for only $470 a week.

32B-32J just ended a month of striking, fighting against this second tier.

Until the very end, the strikers enjoyed little support from the general public and from other unions. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable that a union of 30,000 people could go on strike in a major union city like New York without causing a commotion. But business went on as usual. People were used to the idea of crossing picket lines and decided ¡that starving unions is an acceptable management tactic. Management maintained a positive public image while cutting down their unions.

Are New York's janitors overpaid?

Possibly. As a janitor, I made almost as much money as my mother, a veteran New York City School teacher with two master's degrees. But by the time my co-workers lost their money to taxes (I paid practically none as a student), union dues, and checkcashing establishments (many didn't have bank accounts), they brought home about $300 a week. In New York, that much is needed just to remain in the lower middle class.

At Yale, however, and across the country, it seems people are beginning to call into doubt the assumption that bluecollar workers deserve to live in the lower middle class. When blue collar employment is a way of life, job security, decent wages, and decent benefits are more important than any free Yankee tickets or phony respect.

-Dan Murphy

Yale's Brat Pack When his mother and aunt showed up at his room on the first day of classes freshman year, Alejandro Montalvo (SM

'99) realized he was going to have to make a few things clear. He asked his mother to act as if he were in another state and to give him advance notice if she wanted to visit him. Bumping into his mother around campus is a risk he faces every day.

Alejandro lives in New Haven and has grown up in close contact with Yale. His mother works at Beinecke and is a Yale alum herself. And Alejandro is not alone in this predicament. A large faction of the children of Yale's faculty and staff end up at Yale.

Aside from the obvious disadvantage of drunkenly bumping into the folks, there are benefits. These students have a unique perspective on the college experience. For years, they have heard what their parend think of the students they have to deal with all day, and now they get to hear the other side of the story.

The odds of running into mom or dad, for the most part, are extremely slim. The offspring of union and faculty members rarely see their parents unless they make a conscious effort. The key lies in sitting down with the folks and clearly defining this new relationship. Adam Davis (TO '95), son of history professor David Davis, asked his parents to "understand that Yale is now my place." In the end, he says, he found himself "going home less than friends from California."

Ben King (PC '96), son of Professor Robert King, an assistant professor at the Yale Child Study Center, avoided going home for the first few years. As a senior, however, he relishes the chance to venture home to do his laundry. "It weirds you out," he says, "you can go home and steal the couch or the fridge."

Alejandro has an added complication in his life these days as a strike becomes increasingly likely. Although he supports his mother and believes that the strike is the right thing to do, he has made an effort to "distance his role as a student from his role as the son of a union member."What would be different if workers strike? "I would go home to eat and save some money," he says.

THE NEW JoURNAL

HIL'S Students wh ose parents are not members of a union do not have these same difficulties. Erin Hilyard (JE '98), whose father works at the Alumni Fund, says, "A strike would not affect me more than anyone else." And then there are those st udents whose families are immersed in Yale.

Peter Hadler's (ES '99) grandfather Robert Berliner (DC '36) was dean of the medical school, h is aunt Nancy Berliner (BK '75, MD '79) is a professor of medicine, his uncle Allan Plattus (SY '76) is assistant dean at the Architecture School, his mother is a part-time teacher of English as a foreign language, and his father, who graduated from the School of Public Health is an occasional guest lecturer at the Medical School. Peter claims that in the event of a strike, "I would be perfectly happy getting free meals and a check for $ 105 per week."

- E/izab~th Embry

The Union Flock Of all the various Yale facilities operated by members of Local 34, perhaps the most obscure is the Bethany Farm.

Referred to simply as "The Farm," it is a 14-acre extension of the Yale School of Medicine located in Bethany, CT. Watching over the 30 animals residing at the farm is a caring man affectionately known as the "University Shepherd."

An employee of the university for over 20 years and a union member since 1984, this Shepherd is the last of a staff that once included several farm workers. Of the two buildings in his charge, one is a barn filled with such classic farm animals as cows and sheep. These lovable creatures are used to make antibodies for immunological research. This is nothing new; the word "vaccine" can be traced back to the Latin "vacca" or cow, which was t h e animal responsible for providing an antibody for fighting smallpox.

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Although the Shepherd plans to honor the union strike, the farm will not be left without a Yale farmer. The Shepherd's supervisor will pinch-hit and rake over his employee's position.

Yet, surely this supervisor is a busy man who will be juggling many different tasks during the strike. Even if he performs all of the necessary chores, business as usual on the farm assumes that there will be no open animal revolt. Although the university has established contingency plans to provide essential services in the event of a strike, it is difficult to anticipate what might happen if the animals, in a move of solidarity with their striking keeper, broke out to wreak havoc across the Bethany countryside. Perhaps animal union action would be more subtle: the cows and sheep might abstain from the production of antibodies, or the "purposebred" cats and dogs might try and find new "purposes" in an attempt to distance themselves from those for whom they were bred.

-Mark Nroman

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Cramped Quarters Gabriel Snyder e alliance between Locals 34 and 35 was forged during a job ction, and every contract negotiation since 1984 has been unctuated by the threat of a hi-local strike. The recent ecision to send Local 34 out before Local 35 was, therefore, unexpected. With a tinge of satisfaction in her voice, Deborah Chernoff, Federation of University Employees spokesperson, explains, "The decision was made to put a slight cramp in Yale's strike plans."

While many immediately questioned the motive of the move, Chernoff defends the strategy: "It became clear in these negotiations that the university was going to use the economic fears of these people and wait it out. Under these circumstances it seemed a better course of action to minimize the impact on people."

The plan arose from discussions in the office that Local 217-a union that represents hotel and restaurant workers in Connecticut and Rhode Island, including the staff at Mory's Temple Bar-Local 34, Local35, and GESO share at 425 College Street. In the small space, the leadership of the Yale unions are in virtually constant contact. Chernoff explains, "People started kicking the idea around over lunch, on some breaks, and in some little meetings that we have." By embracing the strategy, the unions have replaced the advantage of numbers with that of stamina. Chernoff continues, "We have our trust in each other and our suppon of each other and we think that ultimately that's the more powerful tool."

"We have a very firm belief that everyone deserves a union, that everybody ought to be in a union, and that is the best way to balance the otherwise unrestrained power that corporations-and we include Yale in that-have," explains Chernoff.

In the early 1980s, Loca135 attempted to organize the clerical and technical workers in Yale facilities in order to broaden their ranks.

Between 1980 and 1984, Local 35's parent organization, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International, spent nearly one million dollars on the effon to form Local 34. Similarly, when GESO began its organizing drive in 1991, Locals 34 and 35 contributed finances and office space to the fledgling organization. GESO now pays its staff with its own dues and help from the Hotel and Restaurant Workers. Chernoff notes, "Practically, more people are better than less people when your primary strength is solidarity."

The federation shares its block of College Street with such bastions of university power and tradition as the Bursar's Office, the Flizabethan Oub, and Woodbridge Hall. Sharing the second and third Boors of the Ftrst Methodist Church at the corner of College and Elm Streets, Yale's unions have learned to live with each other.

Behind the plain beige doors off College Street are the church

Ti

offices; up the stairs lies the unions. Like the rest of the free space in the office, the stairway landings are used for storage-in this case old picket signs. A double door leads into a dim hall that also serves as a file room.

Before you get to the receptionist, there are two rooms packed with more file cabinets and the copier. A meeting room, one of the more spacious areas in the offices, sits off of the first storage room. At the end of the hall, the bulk of the federation office staff performs routine organizational functions such as handling dues and bookkeeping.

On the third Boor at the top of the stairwell, one room houses the leadership of Local 217, Local 34, Local 35, and GESO. With the room's high ceilings and light blue walls covered with union posters, there are enough windows to make the room seem bigger than it really is. Unlike the stereotypical corporate or government office, there are no panitions or cubicles. Despite the openness of the third Boor relative to the claustrophobic rooms downstairs, the entire space is vittually filled with clusters of desks that delineate "offices." The office furniture is a mish-mash of solid steel, pressboard, and vinyl. The floor is littered with copies of the New Haven Advocate and The NatU1n. ough the room appears to hold one compacted collection of apers and union paraphernalia, it is actually carefully partitioned. In the corner to the right of the entrance sit the GESO desks. Posters protesting the university's treatment of its TAs are used like wallpaper. In the opposite corner is Pat Carter's desk, the head organizer of Local 34. Robin Brown, GESO chairperson, and Bob Proto, president of Local 35, claim adjoining desks. All three are scattered with papers.

Moving along the far wall, there are a few Local 217 desks, but most are taken up by Local 34 staff. At the end is Local 34 president Laura Smith's desk Covering most of the desktop are well-organized wire dividers with hundreds of manila file folders. Smith spends a lot of her time out of the office organizing, and her desk looks seldom used for much more than storing papers. Around to the right corner of the room is the common area of the third Boor where federation employees, Gordon Lafer (M. Phil. '91), research director, and Michael Boyle (PC '79), chief negotiator, have their desks and share space with the four union computers. Next to the computers are the Local 35 desks that , run along the wall towards the door.

From a makeshifr office waiting room on the second Boor, acrually just a chair wedged in a comer between the receptionist's desk and the door, you can see the heads of the federation clerical staff over the tops of file cabinets and haphazard stacks of folders and papers. Most of the light in the room comes from desk lamps. On an overcast day the room

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is poorly"lit, but the mood is light thanks to Bob Proto. Dressed in jeans and a corduroy shirt, he leans against one file cabinet and jokes with the women in front of their computers. Though he is only a few yards away, his jokes are lost in the buzz of activity and the eternally ringing phone.

While waiting in the chair by the receptionist's desk, your knees will jut out in front of the door. Most people walking in will probably say, as is common in the close confines of the union office, "excuse me," as they pass by. Laura Smith does this when she comes into the office. Dressed in more traditional business attire, she squeezes by to the IN/OUT board and slides her Tootsie Roll magnet to the IN column. The board only lists first names. Since there are apparently two Lauras in the office, Smith is listed as, "Laura S." Noticing her enter, Proto breaks away from his conversation and leads Smith into the open area of the hall. The heads of the two unions discuss a mundane matter next to the coat hooks. Rather than playing phone tag between separate offices, officials of each union run into each other in the hall. Lafer explains, "There's a lot of stuff that gets done by people walking by my desk or while walking down to the Xerox

machine." f the mechanics of the alliance between the unions are calibrated in the halls, overall strategy is handled in more traditional meetings. After a day of fruitless contract negotiations, representatives of each union meet with Michad Boyle in the second floor meeting room. Today, the negotiating session only lasted 20 minutes and ended with a shouting match between Boy~e and Brian Tunney, university director for labor relations.

Before the meeting begins, a list of attendees is lefr at the receptionist's desk. Matthew Walker

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(TO '85), research staff for the Hotel and Restaurant Workers, half-jokingly protests, "Why am I always put last?" The 11 people attending the meeting first crowd the hallway as the list is checked again; they then file into the meeting room.

The physical relationship in the office has an influence on and reflects the political relationship of the three unions. As Lafer explains, "I think the alliance has gotten stronger over the years both between 34 and 35 and between 34 and 35 and GESO because you just get to know people and see what they're like and see what their jobs are

like.n

Aside from the intimacy of the office, the relationship between Locals 34 and 35 is structurally encouraged by their joint contract negotiations. Of the university's demands, many are targeted at Local 35, such as the two-tier wage system and cut-backs in the alternate work program during the summer.

Though the university has argued that it is not conspiring to 'bust' the unions, Chernoff sees the proposals as a move to "undermine the unions' existence on campus," particularly local 35. "Cerci.inly the university has gone after Local 35 with a bigger axe than they went after Local34," she says. Still the alliance

plans to have Local 34 strike first. Chernoff explains, "We don't look at it as Local 34 is out and Local 35 is not. This is a strategic decision we made together." She continues, "Local 34 members understand extremely well that even if the axe isn't aimed at their neck right at this moment, or at least not in the same way, that they'll be next."

W

en Chernoff says "we" she refers o Local34 and Local35. GESO's ole in the federation is still in question. When asked if Locals 34 and 35 see GESO becoming a full partner in the labor alliance, Chernoff answers, "Obviously, that is going to depend on what happens and what path GESO chooses to pursue."

For now, that path is likely to be largely on its own. As Lafer explains, "Right now the main focus is the Local 34 and 35 contract."

As for GESO, Chernoff explains, "They're not an issue on the table." She continues, "We made a big commitment to them a long time ago, and we're going to continue to suppon them, but they are also an independent organization."

Without a contract or recogrution, Lafer emphasizes that GESO must be willing to fight for itsel£ "Each group is responsible for

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answerin~for themselves the question of 'Do you have the will to figh t?' It's not t hat somebody else strikes for you, it's that somebody else respects the path you have put yourself on to strike." La.fer argues, "It doesn't make sense for GESO to go on strike now.

Right now, in the aftermath of the grade strike, we have to regroup and pull together." But a yellowing poster still hangs above Robin Brown's desk: "Three Unions, Three Contracts. Loca134, Local35, GESO."

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e the College Street office creates intimacy among the leadership the unions, the rank-and-file members do not spend much time there. Lafer explains, "If you work in the same cramped little space with people, you get close to them."

But he admits, "I think the leadership has more of this day-to-day closeness." T he alliance has sought to encourage bonds becween members with Saturday workshops that allow small groups of people from each organization to meet each other. Lafer admits, though, that fostering a close relationship on the rank and file level "is a slow process that happens over time." Lafer continues, "There are real differences between GESO and 34 and 35, and the way the alliance works is not on the basis of trying to make everyone feel like we are all the same." Chernoff explains, "There is a common thread for us, and it's that were employees of the same employer and that sort of defines our community of interest."

To remind the leadership who that employer is, taped next to the door leading to the stairwell, a life-sized head of university president Richard Levin yells, " More

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THE NEW JouRNAL

Perspectives on Work at Yale Whitney Lawson

(above) Connie Tyrell, Durfee's Sweet Shop worker, 20 years with Yale, Local35 member. "Because ofthe way Yale is treating its dining hall workers, I am against Yale's proposed changes in the dining hall system. There is so much talent and potential in the Yale workforce. Yale doesn't need to go outside that."

(right) Mike Keller, Yale University Art Gallery guard, 10 years with Yale, Local34 member. "I've been at Yale for ten years, and I lhzve worked very hard here. I don't like the idea ofsubcontracting.

I think Yale should keep the job in the family. As long as they have a good bunch of workers, that's who the jobs should go to." (on left) Kenneth M Brown, Sr., Calhoun dining hall second cook, 13 years at Yale, Local35 member. "Yale has a moral obligation to the hundreds ofpeople that it employs. have given Yale the best years ofour lives. How can Yale, which is not even taxed, say that it cannot afford a reasonable salary and benefits for its employees? I started here when I was 18 years old. Now I have four kids, rent to pay, a car to maintain. I feel very strongly that Yale should not follow national trends such as downsizing. Yale should show respect for the people who have given Yale so much oftheir time and energy."

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,.

• I

-.-·

(on right) Curtis Greene, Calhoun dining hall first cook, 22 years with Yale, Local35 member. "I'll strike because a work action is our last resource for getting Yale to give its workers a decent contract." ~ photos by Whitney Lawson/The New Jouma/

13 •

I I

John Sweeney on Labor: An Interview with the President of the AFL·CIO with Dan Murphy As Yale's union~ management struggle heats up, the organized labor movement nationwide is facing the effects of • lM-- . .;.· corporate down-sizing, challenges from within, and a stagnant economy.

The labor movement has turned to john Sweeney, the newly-elected president of the-American Federation ofLabor-Congress ofIndustrial Organizatiom (AFL-CIO), to provide progressive leadership for the flagship coalition ofthe nations most powerfol unions by re-energizing grassroots organizing activity.

The New Journal interviewed Sweeney three months into his term and asked him to comment on the significance of negotiations at Yale and the prospects for organized labor heading into the twenty-first century.

TNJ: How did you first get involved in organized labor?

Sweeney: My father, an Irish immigrant, was a bus driver in New York City. He was a member of the Transport Workers Union and as a child. I used to go with him to union meetings. Mike Quill headed up the Transport Workers then-he was a great leader with a wonderful Irish brogue. Anyway, I saw how my father's union helped him earn a decent living to support his family, how it helped him get dignity and respect at work, and how it helped him send his kids to college so we could enjoy a better life than he did.

Coming out of college with an economics degree, I knew I wanted to do union work, but the first job I could get was with IBM for $90 a week. After a short time, I was offered a job as a rep with the International Garment Workers Union for $60 a week-and I jumped at the chance. Working on behalf of working men and women is the most rewarding job anybody could ever have, and I feel honored to get to do it.

TNJ: What do you see as your most important accomplishments since your recent election to office, and what's on your agenda for the near future?

Sweeney: It was very important for me, in the aftermath of the election, to heal the divisions that had developed and restore a sense of unity, and we've made good headway on that. It was also critical to begin immediately to put forward not just a vision but also a program for change, so that we could build to meet the huge challenges working families face, and I feel we've done that too. We

immediately hired pretty much ..all new top staff, including a new General Counsel who knows how to use the law creatively to help build power for working families. We have a new government affairs team (politics and legislation), a new head of public affairs to build a program so that we can speak out forcefully for workers and their families, and a new director of organizing to begin the most important work of all-growing our movement.] In just a few months, we have involved some of the brightest staff leaders from more than 20 national unions in developing a blueprint for action...And all of the top three officers have been traveling the country ~peaking to workers and leaders-out where we should be:

TNJ: Is there a nationwide change in the character of union · membership/leadership?

Sweeney: Work in the U.S. is not what it was just a few decades ago, with the dedine in manufacturing jobs and the rise of global corporations. There are more women in the workforce, more Latinos and other people of color. The faces of our leadership muse change to mirror our membership-bringing more women, people of color, and young people into our leadership. We made good progress at the convention in October, but much remains to be done at every level, and it js one of our highest priorities.

TNJ: What is the role of white collar workers in the future of organized labor? How does the interaction between blue and white collar workers effect union strategy?

Sweeney: White collar workers are no less anxious-and no less dumped on-than blue collar workers today. Since I was most recently president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents hundreds of thousands of white collar employees, I think I understand well why these workers will be an important part of the future of the labor movement. None of us will succeed unless we come together to succeed together. As I said in my acceptance speech at the convention, from high tech co hard hat, no matter what the color of your collar, this labor movement will be there for you.

TNJ: Graduate students employed by Yale as instructors are attempting to unionize. What are the pros and cons of unionizing individuals in fields not traditionally perceived as union jobs (e.g. graduate student employees)? · Sweeney: The advantages of unionizing workers in fields not traditionally perceived as union jobs are obvious-the greater

THE NEW JoURNAL

leverage to win higher pay as well as rights, the greater respect that comes with having rightS guaranteed by contract, the opportunity to achieve solidarity among all classes of workers. In the end, of course, every union is just what irs members make it. I cannot see a disadvantage.

try even harder to replace more experienced, better paid employees with "cheaper" employees. It pits workers against workers, so it's the "classic divide-and-conquer" tactic. Ironically, where two-tier systems have been allowed to happen, they also work out badly for employers because they create such huge morale problems.

TNJ: As the American economy changes, how will the role of unions at American universities change? Do you see colleges as one of the strongholds for organized labor? How do labor situations at colleges and other place-bound institutions differ from those in ordinary business?

Sweeney: Since universities are "workplaces" where a certain level of decent treatment and mutual respect among employees and the employer have traditionally existed (unlike many other workplaces) then university employees are rypically among the first to react when they believe that standard, and"their trust, h as been violated.

So it is very likely that employees at colleges and universities will form unions if universities do not give them th e respect they deserve. This is not really new-it's been happening at a quickening pace for the past 20 years. Often, once university employees establish a new position of respect through their unions, the kinds of partnership employees are able to enter into with managem ent are among the strongest and m ost productive anywhere.

TN]: Some students believe that Yale's workers are weakening Yale by demanding higher pay, threatening to strike, and bringing negative media attention to the university. How do Yale students benefit from the presence of a strong organized labor force on campus?

Sweeney: If decent living standards and power for workers are a problem, bring them on! Seriously, how in the world would it "damage" Yale for its students to see that respect for work and for the importance of work are still valued in this society-and that some people are willing to stand up for it. Workers who have a voice in their jobs are more productive employees, and t heir workplaces gain because of it.

TN]: It's been suggested that Yale is attempting to weaken Local 35, Yale's oldest and strongest union, by redu cing employee benefits and by using casual workers and sub-contractors. Do unions, particularly those at schools, face a legitimate threat of being crippled or even broken in the near future?

Sweeney: Any union (and workforce) will be crippled if employers get away with exploiting their employees or replacing experienced, decently paid employees with poorly prepared and poorly paid employees. That's a fundamental attack on every employee, and unfortunately, it's increasingly common for employers to follow these short-term gains, long-term pain strategies. But workers together have tremendous strength, and it's the power of workers standing together against these threatS that protect them.

TN]: Yale has proposed a two-tier wage system with a lower pay and benefit scale for new hires. What are the dangers of implementing such a system?

Sweeney: A two-tier system is simply an invitation for employers to

TNJ: What possible roles do you see for Yale undergraduates concerned about the outcome of these labor negotiations?

Sweeney: Fortunately, students have often been at the front of social change. Whether it's as basic as petitions to show support, participating in community outreach to build support or more creative tactics, students can be a powerful force.

TN]: In 1984, Yale experienced a ten-week strike as irs clerical and technical workers fought for unionization. Did the national AFLCIO play a role in supporting Yale's unions at that time? In your opinion did that strike and subsequent unionization have ramifications for organized labor as a whole?

Sweeney: The AFL-CIO supported that strike. The visibility of that strike was a huge boost to organized labor. It gave workers nationwide courage to see employees at a "glamorous" place like Yale stand up for their righrs.... We would welcome an opportunity to help if the Yale unions feel they need help from us. As I said earlier, solidarity is the only way any of us can be strong.

IIIJ

Dan Murphy. a sophomort in Timothy Dwight Colkgt, is circuLztion and subscription managtr o[fNJ.

15

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GESO labors to define a collective identity as it struggles wi th the university.

Blue Collar or ¡Blue Blazer?

Joel Burges ESO had reached its breaking point. On the evening of January 14, a portion of the membership of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization filled a classroom in William L. Harkness Hall. But that night, graduate students were not in WLH 119 to learn. They were there to vote.

Corey Robin (GRD '96) stood. He read a statement expressing the leadership's admiration for the teaching assistants who had followed through on their commitment to the grade strike begun in December 1995. However, he explained, it was beginning to look as though the grade strike was driven by only a faction of GESO. The leadership recommended that the strike come to an end.

When the floor opened for discussion, some members stressed the need to continue support for the three teaching assistantsDiana Paton (GRD '99), Cynthia Young (GRD '98), and Nilanjana Dasgupta (GRD '98)-who had charges brought against them by David Davis, professor of history, Sara Suleri Goodyear, professor of English, and a member of the psychology department, respectively.

Still others agreed that the strike should end. "Our first reaction to ending the strike was strongly opposed," Christopher Cobb (GRD '96) explains. "It was hard to get past that and reason through that we had much to lose and little to gain by continuing."

Since December, a number of graduate students in GESO had considered the grade strike to be an ill-conceived and unethical course of action. Had GESO better prepared-perhaps even organized-undergraduates for the job action, feelings towards GESO might have been less hostile. Without undergraduate hostiliry, the argument goes, more graduate students would have

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16

been committed to upholding the grade strike. In the face of this adversiry, compounded by threats of administrative action, many graduate students turned in grades even though they had promised GESO they would not. The uniry of a group ostensibly acting collectively began to disintegrate, and what one graduate student called a "crisis of trust" came to a head that night in WLH as ballots were cast, and the grade strike carne to an end.

"The meeting was extraordinary in every sense. Conversations were heated and heart-felt," Tom Thurston (GRD '96) says. "It was a very difficult decision to come to-my own position changed during the meeting." Thurston went into the meeting in favor of the strike's cancellation. He thought that they would then be able to walk out with Locals 34 and 35 if they voted to strike that Friday. In the course of the meeting, it became evident that the grade strike would end, but just what the end meant was unclear. About halfway through, Thurston realized that the leadership had no intention of recommending another job action so soon after the grade strike. He then decided to change his vote and cast his ballot in favor of continuing the grade strike. Although others may have arrived at the same conclusion as Thurston, some felt confused and angry by what they perceived as a sudden about-face on the part of the leadership.

T

he impulse among graduate students to unionize and the factionalization that GESO experienced the ~ight of the emergency meeting both arise from problems inherent to the idea that students can also be workers. A myth circulates that Yale hires graduate students as teaching assistants to create a relationship

THE NEW JouRNAL

of mentor and apprentice between professor and student. Some graduate students argue that such a relationship is the invention of the administration, that the "myth of mentorship" is a misguided attempt by administrators to splinter "student" and "employee" into mutually exclusive categories.

"To say that one cannot be simultaneously a student and an employee of the same institution makes as little sense as saying that one cannot be both a woman and black," Diana Paton contends.

Thurston suggests that the reasoning behind the split is based upon a view of graduate students as people who are "j ust passing through," upon identifying them as "temporary residents."

When detractors of GESO refer to Tom Thurston and other graduate students as academic transients, it bothers him: "I get tired of that," he says. "My daughter started kindergarten in the Hamden School District. She's in fifth grade now. We have roots in this community." Unlike many graduate students, Thurston has a history as a worker and feels he knows when he is working. From 1978 to 1986, Thurston worked as a machine operator in a food processing plant in Los Angeles. He was also a shop steward for the Teamsters union for about four of the nine years that he worked in a California warehouse. He is not trying to claim that his working class background makes it immediately evident to him that what he does is work, but, rather, that his past experience in the workplace informs his belief that GESO should be recognized as a collective bargaining unit.

Kathleen Clark (GRD '97), a leader in GESO, locates the seed of her dissatisfaction with her working conditions by emphasizing Yale's failure to construct a pedagogical relationship between graduate students and faculty. "I fail to see how learning precludes working," she says. "I have never encountered any evidence to support the claim that the primary purpose of my work as a TA is to contribute to my education." Her language also reveals an abstract, academic understanding of her situation. "When I have applied for jobs in the history department and the women's studies department, I have been asked to demonstrate my qualifications for teaching a particular course." She says, "I have never been asked, for example, 'Which teaching opportunity do you think would best contribute to your education at Yale?' or 'What would you most like to learn about teaching?' There is no teaching requirement for my degree. I have never received any pedagogical instruction from a member of the faculty [about how to teach]." Clark's sense of herself as a worker coupled with her background among the cultural elite complicates her relationship to a drive for unionization. The

complication comes from a pervasive image of intellectuals as upper-middle class and unionized laborers as working class.

But the stories Clark and other graduate students tell suggest that the impulse to organize collectively may not depend on the socioeconomic class to which one belongs. Changes in the working conditions of any group may lead to unionization.

"The experience that made it clearest to me that my teaching was work carne at the beginning of my fourth year. The year before I'd TA'd for the Shakespeare lecture both semesters," comments Christopher Cobb. "I decided I needed to broaden my teaching experience. So I listed 'Pope and Swift' and 'Milton' as my two top choices for the fall term." After the English department bumped him out of "Pope and Swift," he thought he might find room in "Milton" because there were too few TAs and too many students.

But an associate director of undergraduate studies in the English department told him, at that point, that they needed him in the Shakespeare class once again.

Cobb's story, like Clark's, suggests that teaching assistantships have nothing to do with mentorship, but, rather, the supply and demand of the academic marketplace we call shopping period. "I was doing a job because it needed to be done," Cobb remarks, "and any benefit that work had for me as training for my future career was only fortuitous. "

T

he impulse to organize and the problems it engenders found one culmination in the recent disciplinary hearings that Cynthia Young, Nilanjana Dasgupta, and Diana Paton faced.

During the fall of 1995, Paton was a TA for David Davis's lecture course, "The Origins, Significance, and Abolition of New World Slavery." Like many graduate students, she decided to withhold grades from the undergraduates in her sections in December. She called Davis the day after the strike vote passed. He told her, she says, her action constituted a "betrayal" that was "unforgivable. " Paton set up a meeting with Davis to discuss their growing differences, but he cancelled her appointment with him a few days later. The same day, she received a letter in which Davis threatened to file a formal complaint with Thomas Appelquist (Hon. MA '76), dean of the graduate school, if she continued to refuse to tum in her' midterm grades. After Davis telephoned Paton to inform her that she would not be needed at the fmal exam on December 15, she sent a letter to him explaining her involvement in GESO and her "regret at his reaction."

But Davis's complaint-which, Paton says, he actually made the

17

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same day she made an appointment with him to talk-had forced both the professor and the TA onto an institutional path to cope with their differences. Paton does not seem to believe that Davis wanted the hearings that resulted from her participation in the grade strike to take place. "While he filed a complaint against me, the administration chose to act on it," she poi~ts. out. The university also chose to act on Davis's request for an adrn;nistr;nor to be present at his exam. According to Jonas Zdanys (BR '72), an associate dean of the graduate school, Davis feared that there would be a demonstration that would disrupt the final. Paton decided to come to the exam, accompanied only by Michele Janette (GRD '96), both because she did not want anyone to claim that she was not doing her job and, more importantly, she knew that her students expected her to be there.

But when she arrived at the exam, Paton discovered Zdanys, Davis, and a policeman all there to ensure she did not enter. The door to the exam room was locked, and when Davis asked her to leave, Paton did so without resistance. Zdanys emphasized that the interaction between the TA and the professor was what he called a "calm exchange between a faculty member and a student." Zdanys returns to the trope of mentorship to describe the scene. For Paton, however, the memory of that day at the exam probably signifies a clear retaliation on the part of the university against an unruly and disobedient employee.

Davis refused to comment on the matter.

Michelle Stephens (GRD '97) thinks that administrative actions like the lockout of Paton at the exam and her subsequent

disciplirr.rry hearings prove that the university does not view TAs as apprentices.

"The fact that the university chose to respond in that way explodes the myth that they think of us simply as 'students,"' argues Stephens. "They responded to us precisely in the way a corporation bent on preventing workers from unionizing would, not as a university seeking reasoned dialogue with students. " Among the . intimidation tactics that Stephens believes · the university has u~ed to try to crush GESO are the hearings Young, Gupta, and Paton faced. Although the university did not single them out because of their gender, race, or nationality, the three women's fears about the outcome of the hearings were compounded by these factors. They are all women; Young is African-American; Gupta is from India, and Paton is British. For the latter two, expulsion or suspension could potentially have resulted in deportation. "I think it's also true that the results of the hearings are potentially more harmful to us in more inchoate ways-as women and as members of racial minorities (less so as foreigners) we already face an uphill struggle to be taken on our merits as scholars, and to be singled out and marked as a troublemaker obviously adds to that difficulty," Paton says. Although the charges against Gupta were recently dropped, Paton and Young received letters of reprimand that will follow them onto the academic job market. ( ( T he politics of identity and difference can only take people so far," suggests Thurston. " People organize because of _common adversaries, not shared conditions." As the meeting that was called to end the grade strike proves, however, not only must a

Tm NEW JouRNAL

The April 6, 1995, GESO rally held outside Sterling Memorial Library. coalition like GESO organize against a common adversary, but with a shared sense of purpose and strategy in mind as well.

Essentially, GESO needs to function collectively.

This lack of collectivity has been a problem, some sources argue, because GESO has moved away from a democratic model to a vanguard one. The democratic model works from the bottom up. The vanguard functions from the top down, making decisions without always considering the opinions of its membership.

One vanguard action by GE$0, one source believes, was the grade strike, in which at least a faction of the organization felt intimidated by organizers and leaders to participate. But the GESO leadership does not view its internal strategies to organize job actions as intimidating, suggests one source, because it has become so focused on fulfilling its demands immediately. There is no long term. The leadership wants everything tomorrow-a difficult task as GESO tries to negotiate such divergent and complex needs from family health care and medical coverage for same-sex couples to smaller sections and more teaching training.

But the desire for immediate gratification makes sense in the context of GE$0, a young and largely middle class union. Historically, graduate students have come from the middle class, though there are certainly notable exceptions, and GESO has taken on a political project that has

typically been a blue collar one. Blue collar unions have succeeded because they acted as collective, democratic units. Now it is time for GESO-what we might call a blue blazer union-to follow suit.

Whether or not the leadership has completely abandoned the democratic model with which GESO began in 1987, many members are beginning to feel disaffected. The grade strike, a bold move to begin with, and its aftermath have hopefully taught GESO a lesson it could not learn in the classroom: the power of its membership to make or break an action.

Fortunately, the central issue around which GESO formed-graduate student laborstill drives the vision the organization is molding as it regroups and reorganizes in the aftermath of the grade strike that gripped the university for five weeks.

Clark puts it this way: "I believe it is the task of my generation of scholars and teachers to organize, to secure decent conditions for what is becoming the bulk of our profession. I also recognize that it is young teachers and scholars like myself who have the most at stake. I don't expect any other group-either administrators or senior faculty-to take responsibility for securing what is, afrer all, our furure. " IJI]

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The ABCs of Student Activism Alec Bemis

H

ey slackers, Generation X'ers, jaded summer waiters, video store employees, M1V zombies; boy, do we have a group for you. Clinically tested, aimed right at the upwardly mobile suburbanite, the urban sophisticate-

it's SLAC. Come on! Everybody's doin' it.

In the midst of SLAC's first public rally on February 1, 1996, Francis Engler (ES '96), a veteran of the acrimonious acronym wars, rattles off the fearsome armada of groups who have found a place under the recently-raised SLAC umbrella: YHHAP (Y~e Hunger and Homelessness Action Project), SJN (Social Justice Network), YUDH (Yale University Dining Hall) Student Workers, SNS (Students for a Negotiated Settlement), and the Yale Women's.

Center. Still, SLAC, as the Student Labor Action Coalition calls itself, has not approached its full potential. Engler proclaims, "In the future dozens of other srudent groups encompassing hundreds" will join the noble flock: SLAC claims its place as the newest in an ever expanding body of student action groups trying to change the world-and brainstorming really cool initials in the process.

Within the alphabet soup of student groups, SLAC has A through Z just about covered. Yale is wimessing an acronym gestalt.

Why, just yesterday they approached the YCC (Yale College Council) for support. Today, members of TUIB (Tangled Up in Blue) provide a folk music backdrop to the rally. When you can hear their rendition of Bob Dylan's "The Time's They are A-changing" above the din it's almost interesting, but you wish the songbook changed with the times.

True, the cause is new-well the name is new-but Francis and his merry band of SLAC'ers have certainly been here before. In demanding that Yale cease its unjust treatment of unionized workers, SLAC reunites the veterans of activist coalitions of the past few years.

Let the images of spring 1995's SCRAP 187 (Student Coalition Rallying Against Proposition 187) take hold. This broad-based coalition of student groups protested California's anti-immigrant referendum with vigor and vim. Bask in the memories of last year's other spurt of popular protest-you know, the one which fought the bursar's hold in fall 1994. They had it all-bullhorns, posterboard placards, and the support of another alphabet soup: BSAY (Black Student Alliance at Yale), RSF (Radical Student Front), Real Diversity, ISO (International Socialist Organization), and Poor at Yale (PAY, of course).

Obviously this is the outgrowth of a wildly activist student body,

20

a seething mass at Yale hungry to 'Gverturn the Man (better known to some as the establishment, Pete Wt.lson, or the Bursar's Office).

They are well-versed in the kindergarten alphabet song and protest chants with choruses of"Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!" They are legion.

Well okay, not really.

The big problem is that there just aren't that many eager activists on campus. Nevertheless the faithful persevere. One thing is for sure: prior to the emergence of SLAC in the last week, SNS had led Yale's activists in their fight for fair union negotiations for years.

Well sorta.

"Do you mean to tell me SNS has survived all these years?" ¡ asked Dan Heller (MC '86), a veteran of the first incarnation of Students for a Negotiated Settlement in 1984. That an activist group with such a narrow focus has emerged during every union negotiation in the years since the 1984-85 strike is truly odd.

Of course, with four years separating each contract, the group has to start fresh each time out. SNS was first conjured up in the spring term of 1984 as Yale's clerical and technical workers dashed with the administration during negotiations for Local 34's first union contract. Formed mostly by Dwight Hall regulars, SNS tried to provide a neutral meeting place for students on both sides of the lSSUe.

.

When Locals 34 and 35 went on strike that year, ending undergraduate access to bad cafeteria food, clean hallways, and showers free of soap scum, the campus became polarized. SNS changed from what Heller categorized "a student voice, a factfinding voice" into a "pro-union organization." This was not a difficult decision.

Karin Cope (BK '85), one of SNS's founders, . said it best in an October 1984 issue of the Yak Daily N~s: "We basically put out some really stupid statements and petitions which basically said nothing because they were so careful in their neutrality." ¡ This is a lesson today's SNS refused to learn. ecember 12, 1995. Today is the closest thing yet to SNS's shining moment. As an SNS press release later recounts the day's events, "Students staged a lunch-hour 'Eat-in' where lines of student ate lunches out of brown paper bags to symbolize what students will be forced to do if there is a strike of university workers in January that closes the dining halls."

Approaching Woodbridge at noon, though, there is but one plump, white-haired Yale police officer wrapped up in his department-issue winter suit, complete with fuzzy navy blue collar

D

THE NEW JouRNAL

"·

and official police cap with fuzzy ear flaps. He is standing vigil in front of the gates. Well, perhaps calling it a "vigil" is giving him, and the event, a bit too much credit. Whatever he's been doing, he has been doing it since 8:30 a.m. After four hours freezing in front of Woodbridge, he is probably not pleased with this assignment-the kind of work an officer might get in his final days of police employment. This officer is in post-doughnut mode.

Instead of being faced with "lines of students," about ten students stand on either side of the policeman. Brown bags are conspicuously absent, and the only sign of a protest is four or five posterboard signs: "Stop playing games with our education;" "Bag the strike not our lunch. Keep the dining halls open." Typical protest fare.

In the Woolsey Rotunda two SNS members present at the brown bag lunch protest are chatting, moments after exiting commons refreshed by a fulfilling meal. After 45 minutes the "protest" has dissolved, and the plump member of the YPD has departed.

A similar scene is reenacted the next day. Despite SNS's claims that it has no leaders, only organizers, it's easy enough to figure out who's in charge: Nick Allen (DC '96), Susie Jakes (TC '97), and Francis Engler. At least these are the people to whom you go for information. They each estimate the group's size at about 40 members with about 20 students making up the organizational core.

This seems accurate given the event's attendance. Matters get more muddled when I hear that some of the students present are technically not SNS members but sympathizers from YHHAP and the UFW (United Farm Workers).

On December 14, a day packed with protests by GESO (Graduate Employee and Student Organization) and Locals 34 and 35 at HGS (Hall of Graduate Studies) and the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, the final day of SNS's eat-in is pretty much snowed out. The SNS press conference, which was to follow

.. . ;.

on the steps of Woodbridge, hasrflroved to .,· the common room of Dwight Hall.

Even after pushing back rhe conference's start by 30 minutes, only 16 · people have made it into the common room-more than half are SNS leaders from the previous afternoon's protest.

Four members of the local press sit in the back along with a lone stringer from the Associated Press, the only representative of the national media present.

The event is filled with fiery position statements from various student groups. That is if you can figure out which organization each student represents. YHHAP representative Jamie Lachman (ES '97) also belongs to SNS. Yale UFW's Cedric de Leon (BR '96), speaks on behalf of UFW (but not officially; he hasn't gotten permission from the California headquarters yet). Jakes shows off a large billboard at the front of the room with over 600 signatures of Yale undergrads who signed SNS's petition. She later tells a Ntw Havm Rtgisttr reponer that SNS itself claims 60 to 70 ...trtembers with a core group of 30 to 40; either a huge membership drive has taken place over the last day, or something is amiss.

After the numbers have been counted and acronyms have been • listed however, one truth becomes apparent: the 1995-96 version of SNS is hardly thriving. ick Allen doesn't have much pride in his extracurricular career at Yale. "I got involved my freshman year in a bunch of different groups," he said. "I have a boring litany of failures." While SNS's other leaders don't couch their previous activist experiences in terms of "failure," they too have participated in a host of now-defunct organizations.

Senior leaders graduate, issues are resolved, the public or membership of a group loses interest and poof .. another group falls apart. Soon enough a new group starts. At first, it must seem odd that at each group's organizational meeting the same five or ten· people are the ones doing all the talking. It's probably disheartening · 1 that the same ten or 20 people are always in the audience.

Allen realizes this. "There's this perception out there that there's this little group of activists," he said, "We're a group that son ~of bears this out, but I have faith that there's a broad layer of people out there that are jusr silent because they're apathetic or whatever but they don't fundamentally disagree with what activists are doing."

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Lauren Goldy Gaspar Gonzales Michele Janette Whitney Lawson Denise Mitchell The Sledge Family Saema Somalya John Sweeney

The thing is there's little evidence to back this up.

Students not already involved in these groups stew in t h eir apathy. They are unaware when these groups coalesce and oblivious when they dissolve. They are out of the social protest loop.

The apathetic become conscious of these groups only when their members are collec~ing signatures in the dining halls, when they're putting up posters, when their position statements are laid out in the Yale Daily New.f-when they're in protest mode.

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anuary 23, 1996. As the rhetoric from the unions and the admin istration mounts, SNS is moderating residential college discussions on issues involving the strike. Nick Allen, ·the SNS member running the night's discussion, strolls in five minutes late. Thirty minutes later no one

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else has shown up.

At the SNS meeting later that night on the second floor of Dwight H all, only eleven undergrads are present. Lamenting the low turnouts at the informati onal sessions, Lachman, who leads the meeting, rationalizes, "At least we got the message out that undergrads were talking abou t the strike."

Discussion revolves around future plans.

"Do we want to start working on PR this week?" Lachman asks.

"Information," says Engler.

Lachman corrects h imself, "Information."

Talk of information and organization dominates the meeting: restarting e-mail lists, making calls to SNS members who are out of the loop, assembling posters to hang around campus. A few central questions are repeatedly asked and answered: Who's going to . make the poster? Who can come to the meeting on Sunday? Who can call t he phone list? Who can be at the service fair in Dwight Hall this week?

Allen wonders whether they should form an official coalition for pro- union activities.

A woman in a pro-choice t-shirr, who had remained silent up to this point, mentions that at the last meeting of the YPU's (Yale Political Union) Liberal Party, "They made a movement to be more . , acnve.

Engler gets an idea a few minutes later suggesting, "Maybe we should restart the Social Justice Network?"

Might as well get a few more groups to help organize, to spread information.

February 1, 1996. Back at the rally.

You would think that with all t he emphasis on informing the public, the SNS platform would be a clearly articulated set of

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Francis Engler (ES '96) contributes to yet another SNS strategy session. ideals, but you would be wrong.

Francis Engler is still standing on a chair in front of Woodbridge Hall, speaki ng though a megaphone, outlining what SLAC is against: the two-tier wage system, increased subcontracting, the elimination of the alternate work program, and the casual worker program-under which homdess are given "exploitative" non-union short-term employment via a temp agency. He's especially against the casual worker program. This was originally a YHHAP protest, so this is a key issue.

It seems like SLAC is finding a clear unified voice. Well it seems that way until coalition member and YHHAP Coordinator Dan Abraham (SM '98) goes and messed it all up again. He comments to a Yale Daily News reporter, "We're not taking a prounion srance. We're pro-worker and prostudent." Not pro-union, just pro-worker.

Oh. Puzzling over this morass of double-talk, thousands of students scratch their heads until blood is drawn. Once again members of the Yale Acronym Corps (YAC) have failed to state their positions with more clarity than the administration they attack for that very sin.

It seems that abstraction has reached beyond the world of art and into the world of sound bites.

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Beyond 59~ Feminism: Local 34 Since '84 Katherine Bell and Suzanne Kim ix weeks into the 1984 Yale clerical and technical workers' strike for union recognition, 52 female faculty members signed an open letter to the Yale community, in which they drew comparisons between their own disadvantaged position and that of the striking clerical and technical workers (C&Ts), 82 percent of whom were women. At the time, women constituted no more than 15 percent of Yale's faculty, and only 15 women held tenured positions. .

C&Ts striving for union recognition struggled to reveal the university's race- and gender-based discriminatory practices against its employees. Molly Ladd-Taylor (GRD '86) argued in a 1985 article in Ftminist Studits that the average C&T salary of $13,424, less than the minimum for a comparable position at Harvard, fell far short of the average salary of a male truck driver at Yale ($18,470). Women not only received less pay than men for comparable work, but they also found themselves amassed in what Nancy Cott (Hon. MA '86), Woodward Professor of history and American studies, calls the "pink collar ghetto," clerical jobs with low wages and little chance of advancement.

The 1984 faculty memo authored by Margaret Homans (PC '74, GRD '78), professor of English, then an associate professor of English, and Cott, then associate professor of history and American studies and chair of the three-year-old women's studies program, stated "The discrimination issue is unresolved. And so long as it remains so, undermines the con1idence and well-being of all women employed at Yale and reduces Yale's attractiveness as a workplace for women." To rectify the obvious gender segregation of occupation and wage discrimination, C&Ts demanded higher wages, increased benefits, and the right to collective bargaining and participation in decisions affecting their workplace. And female faculty, who had also encountered Yale's resistance to gender equity and its lack of symbolic and economic recognition of their work, firmly supponed them.

In May 1983, Yale clerical and technical workers voted to create Local 34 in association with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) by a mere 39 votes. Almost a year later, more members voted to suike than had originally voted for the union. The C&Ts had succeeded in organizing from the

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bottom up a remarkably inclusive and democratic organization that brought together a network of women, many of whom had never before considered themselves either feminist or pro-labor.

In one of its trademark unconventional strategic moves, Local 34 voted in March 1984 to accept a partial contract which resolved all non-economic issues while preserving the union's right to strike.

But in September, after months of negotiations, two-thirds of Yale's C&Ts hit the picket lines, joined by Local 35. Linda Anderson, administrative assistant to the women's studies program, recalls that her initial feeling of humiliation on the picket line was quickly replaced by fierce pride. Two years after the strike, she wrote in the feminist journal Frontiers: "It was the kind of action that changed history, like the rallies, lobbying, and demonstrations to gain suffrage, or to win the legal right to abortion."

In December, the unions voted to return to work temporarily to collect desperately needed wages before the holidays and to avoid the demoralization of picketing an empty campus during winter break. The new strike deadline was set for January 19, 1985 the day Local 35's contract would expire. But in late January, both unions successfully negotiated their contracts, narrowly avoiding another strike.

Local 34's strike for recognition has been written into the history of the feminist movement as a pivotal labor dispute in the fight for the economic and symbolic acknowledgment of women's work. It rode the crest of 1970s feminism, arriving in the midst of a national debate over the legal issues of comparable worth and pay equiry. But it is worth questioning the origin of the feminist elements of the labor dispute.

Nancy Con believes that the focus on economic discrimination against women arose from the C&Ts themselves, while faculty and students attached a more abstract and self-consciously feminist rhetoric to the labor dispute. Anderson agrees that union organizers did not explicitly employ the term feminist. But, she insists, "They were extremely diligent about talking about the economic discrimination against women and minorities." According to Molly Ladd-Taylor, Local 34's focus on grass-roots organization and small group discussions ensured that the union's concerns derived from the C&Ts themselves instead of from preconceived ideas of what

women's issues should be. Anderson remembers a sense of intimacy and strength on the picket lines and at union rallies as the women of Local 34 began to experience female solidarity and empowerment whether or not they labeled their experience as feminist.

As the strike wore on, its feminist elements drew more and more attention. Faculty and students seized on Local 34's fight as a practical point around which to organize political action, a real-life performance of academic feminism. "The union drive and strike were women's studies in practice," Anderson writes, "a chance to apply all that theory." Hundreds of sympathetic students walked the picket lines and anended rallies. Many refused to pay their spring tuition and sued the administration for breach of contract. The Women's Center distributed pro-union literature and took charge of moving more than 300 classes off campus. Homans recalls that about 100 faculty members held a demonstration every Monday afternoon during the strike. Faculry support reached far beyond New Haven. Hazel Carby, professor of American studies, and African-American studies, who taught at Wesleyan University at the time, participated in a network of support for Local 34 that spanned American academia. Even the Modern Language Association censured the universiry.

0

n an unseasonably cold March 8, 1984, 4,000 Local 34 supporters gathered to celebrate International Women's Day in front of Woodbridge Hall where the Yale Corporation was scheduled to meet.

Twelve years later, on February 2, 1996, Local 34 and 35 members gathered outside another Yale Corporation meeting. This time, the weather was quite seasonably cold, the numbers fell far short of 4,000, and the placards and buttons calling for respect were noticeably absen~ ¡ Local 34's rhetoric has changed drastically since 1984 when the ' drive for union recognition drew mass student and faculty support, creating a sense of shared purpose and female solidarity. This year's labor issues have failed to fall nicely into a clear morality play between good workers and a bad university-at least in the minds of many students and professors.

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Chernoff, also active in the 1984 strike, acknowledges that current union demands have strayed from the overt fem inism of 1984. She accounts for this by pointing to workers' increased sense of stability, now that Local 34 has succeeded in its attempt to gain recognition. But any complacency is premature. While Local 34's agi tation helped close the oft-cited 59 cents to the dollar disparity between women's and met:t's pay, a gap still exists. Desp ite Local 34's acknowledgment of the persistence of sexism on an abstract as well as material level, issues of gender-based inequity have been far less publicized than they were in 1984. Gaining union recognition ushered in a new era of in creased , b u t not unqualified, respect. "There is still a sense that women are not tough, that [Local] 34 is carried by an older, tough er, more masculine union," says Chernoff. But she points to the dramatic growth in national union membership in the predominantly female service sector as proof of women's strength in the labor movement. And it was Local 34, not Local 35, that was slated to walk out on February 7. According to the Yale Daily Ntws, union leaders decided that Local 34 should strike first to prove itself as strong as Local35.

Locals 34 and 35 have spearh~ded the efforts to reveal the university's exploitation of casual workers in a manner similar to the unions' treatment of the issue of women's expl oitation in 1984. Accordin g to Chernoff, casual workers are largely African-American and male. T he unions oppose what they perceive as the university's attempt to trap vulnerable minorities, some of whom are homeless, in jpbs wi th no benefits and little security.

But t he issue of casual workers has failed co catch on in the way that the plight Tm NEW JouRNAL

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603 Orange St. New Haven, CT 06511 Buttons worn on the picket lines ofLocal 34's 1984 strike. of female C&Ts did. According to Carby, this year's labor issues seem less clear-cut to the public. Instead of launching a feminist critique of the university, Locals 34 and 35 have concentrated on building a broader labor consciousness, a tactic that has failed to garner support from most of the Yale community. "Faculty and students on campus have historically been as classist in their views towards the people who work here as the administration has," says Anderson. She maintains that the concerns of female workers have not disappeared, but have become inextricably tied to race and class issues that make it harder to elicit support. "I still think it's a feminist issue," says Anderson, "But it's feminism and class and race-they can't be separated."

Chernoff amibutes the waning support for labor to an overall political climate desensitized to workers' concerns. "We live in a world where it's commonplace to read abo ut corporate profits soaring with thousands laid off," she says. "It's become normative. Downsizing has become a business term. It's lost its shock value."

The crucial difference between the political mobilization in 1984 and the present lies in the extent to which faculty and students have been able to relate to workers' concerns. "There is not a natural tie-in now," say Chernoff. "Students don't have the ability to relate to casual workers."

In particular, an· alliance berween faculty and staff came more easily in 1984. The grievances cited by female professors in the

1984 open letter testified to the far-reaching nature of gender-based inequity at Yale in all arenas- from clerical offices to lecture halls. The majority of professors who signed the memo were junior faculty, who had lirt1e job security and no promise of tenure.

These professors identified with the vulnerability of female clericals and technicals whose work had also been ignored. It seems that this year's labor struggle differs vastly from 1984's. Gone are the feminist overtones on the negotiating table, the talk of comparable worth, job segregation, and lack of tenured faculty.

But the disparities still exist. The number of tenured female faculty falls far short of the number of men in these positions. Local 34 itself admits it still has a long way to go to achieve comparable pay.

The issues of economic insecurity that drew assistant faculty and C&Ts together in 1984 have reappeared in the discussion over casual workers. But the relatively small amount of faculty support fo r Locals 34 and 35 this year shows lirt1e recognition of this connection. Casual workers seem far and removed from the experiences of professors and students. But if the campus is ever going to rally around the union's agenda, these connections must be remembered.

181

Katherine Bell, a senior in Calhoun College, is managing editor ofTNJ. Suzanne Kim, a senior in Saybrook College, is editor-in-chief ojTNJ.

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A Formal Response to Casual Labor .,

Karen Jacobson To: Casual Employw From: Pnn D. Vailont, Associau Via Prtiidmt for Administration Rt: Union Organizing Activitits As many ofyou art awart ... Locals 34 and 35 oftht Fedtration of Univtrsity Employus have announced thtir intention to organize urtain of Ytzks casual tmpioyw for purpous ofcollective bargaining.

per day. Last week I worked 32 hours. I hope to get a job here, of course. What , cousin? Well, my man , I know you work construction and all, that gives you work startin' in March. Me~ there is nothing else. When the students go on break, we go on break. New Haven don't have no ot.h er work. If I don't work here, I get no money, and I have three kids to feed.

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Yeah~¡~l'm a casual. Work here in the dining hall. Just hangin' out here to see if there's work. Been working here for 17 months.

My man here has been a casual for three years. You know, I show up every morning, see if someone didn't show up for a shift. See, there are a lot of students working in the kitchen, and they don't show up. Or someone goes on vacation. Or gets sick. No, I don't know if I'll have work every day. Get usually 'bout 4 to 8 hours

As part of their organizing activity, Locals 34 and 35 have attempted to solicit inurest in thtir unions by making dirtct visits to casual employus at their workplaces. Many of you have raiud qutstions about tht unions' activity. This mtmorandum is intentkd to answer the most common I:Y asked questions.

Qutstion: Must I talk to Local 34 organizers at work?

Answtr: Absoluttly not. It is a violation of University policies for union organizers or others to inurftre with the work activitits ofothtr t mpwyus. Thtrefore, if union organizers inttrftre with you during work timt, you should indicau that you are not on break and you wish to bt left alont. If union organizers approach you during your non-working timt, you should ful fru to talk to them or not, at your discrttion. l'Ou can ask organizm to leave you awne, and if they don't rtsptct your wishts, you should inform your supervisor immtdiattly.

Did I sign a union card? Sure, why not. I mean, they asked me, and I want a job. But that don't mean nothing. I just want work. You're not tape recording this or nothin'? I don't care if you don't know my name , they might recognize my voice or something, and I can't lose this work. You're not recording? 0.1(.

Yeah, I wouldn't cross the picket line. What, cuz? You'd cross the picket line? No, no, no, man, don't get me wrong, I don't want no strike. If there were a strike, I wouldn't get no pay. I wouldn't cross, but I don't know what I would do. I mean, I hav.e three kids to feed.

Qutstion: What

if union

organizas attempt to contact mt at

THE NEW JouRNAL

home?

Answer: Although union organizers can lawfully attempt to contact you at home, either in person or by telephone or mail, you have a right to privacy and you may refuse to deal with them. If they persist in bothering you, you may contact the University or New Haven police or bring the matter to the attention ofLabor Relations.

Come see me at home? I live nearby here, on Elm Street, a few blocks up. I couldn't do this job if I lived farther away. I have to come here everyday in the morning and all, so I just walk up here, come to the back of Branford. I wait to see the supervisor, see if there are any shifts. Or I get a call telling me there's work. Not just anybody can come off the street and be a casual. Had to go to Yale's Human Resources and fill out forms, so they know what I can do and that I want work. Hope to get a real job here someday, when there's an opening. It happens. Not often, but sometimes.

What do I do here? Sister, we are everybody, we do everything.

We done everything except cook the food. We casuals, we are better workers because we try a lot harder. Union workers, they set. They slack off because they have jobs. Not us. They say go sweep the floor, we sweep. They say go wash the dishes, we do. I get paid $9.06 an hour. That's not much money for everyone I'm supporting. Benefits? What?

Question: Art union organizers allowed to pressure me even if I want nothing to do with the union?

Answer: No. You have the legal right not to participate in union activities, which means that no one can lawfully pressure you to talk to them, to review literature, to explain your point of view, or anything elu. Moreover, no one can retaliate against you for participating in, or refusing to participate in, union activities. Ifyou foe/ threatened or pressured by union organizing tactics, pkau "J'Ort the situation to your supervisor and to Labor Relations immediately.

The University will investigate any threats and take appropriate action.

No, I don't think nothin' is going to change. My man here has been working here three years. He ain't better off. Yeah, I've seen those pins people are wearing. "I don't want to strike but I will."

Me, I got no choice. If there's no work, I don't know what I'll do.

The union won't give me no money during a strike.

Remember: You have a kgal right not to be pressured, harassed or intimidated by union organizers. If you have any questions at all, pkase ask your supervisor or call Labor Relations.

Yes, I'm the dining hall manager. Usually casuals are just subs.

Usually I'll call students first, then I'll call casuals. I call. No one should be here hanging out. If someone's hanging out I should be lmJ aware of it, and I will take care of it.

Excerpts art taken from an actual ktter smt from Peter Vallone to casual workers on january 15, 1996. The casual worker is based on conversations with two workers who wished to remain anonymous and who are unconnected to those pictured. The words from the dining ' hall manager art a direct quote.

Karen jacobson, a junior in jonathan Edwards College, is research director ofTNJ.

After the .Grade Strike Michael Denning n the weeks since the end of GESO's grade strike on January 15, a number of journalists, administrators and commentators have proclaimed the d~mise of Yale's gra~uate student union. B~t the reports of GESO s death are greatly exaggerated: GESO will not go away, and it is worth reflecting on the most recent skirmish in a battle which has lasted throughout the 1990s.

The origins of the grade strike lie in more than six years of graduate student organizing, culminating in last April's vote by graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. In a ballot supervised by the League of Women Voters, two-thirds of the 1100 eligible voters voted, and 78 percent voted for GESO as their collective bargaining agent. GESO won the support of an absolute majority of the graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, and no one--administration, faculty, or graduate studentshas publicly challenged the fairness of that secret ballot.

In the eight months since the vote, the Yale administration simply reiterated its refusal to recognize the graduate student union, despite the fact that recognized graduate student unions exist at a dozen universities across the country, including the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. The administration's violation of the academic freedom and collective bargaining rights of the graduate teachers was based on the flimsy case that the standards recognized at peer public institutions were not applicable to private institutions like Yale.

Thus, the GESO decision to conduct a grade strike was taken afrer much debate and soul searching; every other means had been tried and exhausted. There have been forums, petitions, marches, demonstrations, visits to members of the Yale Corporation, and brief teaching strikes. And the grade strike was a difficult and controversial action: I understand that both the decision to begin the strike and to end it were the subject of heated debate and the result of democratic procedures.

Despite the often ignorant and hysterical response of Yale administrators and senior faculty, the grade strike was not an act of civil disobedience; it was a job action, the legal withholding of labor.

And it was not a violation of a sacred responsibility. Indeed, on December 2, 1995-before the grade strike began-the Collective

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Bargaining Congress of the American Association of University Professors (MUP) not only endorsed the graduate student union, but recognized grade strikes as a legitimate form of academic job action.

In a resolution adopted by unanimous consent, they stated, "We . believe that all academic teaching staff, including graduate teaching¡ assistants, have the right to collective bargaining, and we urge the members of the Yale University administration to honor this right. As members of a faculty union, we know that it is sometimes necessary to engage in job actions in order to achieve the goals of educational quality and workplace fairness. Those who participate in such efforts-whether a teaching strike, grading strike, or other academic job actions-do so not out of disrespect for education, but its opposite: out of a commitment to the value of teaching. We hope that such efforts will be respected, and in no case should they be the subject of academic reprisals. We urge our Yale colleagues to uphold these standards in the current unionization drive of Yale graduate teachers." The MUP has been a leading voice for academic freedom in this country for most of the century, and has often spoken out against university administrations that have violated the rights of teachers. The fact that GESO consulted the AAUP before their action speaks well of the thought and soul searching that went into their decision.

The GESO teachers did everything to make this an orderly grading strike. They did their grading, and offered to write letters of recommendation for any undergraduate senior who needs fall grades for graduate or professional school applications. Their union set up a hot line for undergraduates who needed help. Many Yale faculty members quietly supported the grade strike by not turning in their teaching assistants. The teaching assistants and part-time acting instructors simply refused to turn in the grades to the university until negotiations began.

Moreover, there were precedents for their action. In 1977, the Massachusetts Society of Professors conducted a grade snike in order to get the University of Massachusetts to negotiate in good faith. "No one took this decision lightly," University of MassachusettS history professor Bruce Laurie recalled in a recent letter. "As a result of the job action the administration began to negotiate in earnest. The Society

THE NEW JouRNAL

in turn released the grades, and a fair settlement ensued."

"The point I wish to stress," Professor Laurie wrote, "is that much to its credit the The Apri/6, 1995, GESO rally held outside Sterling Memorial Library. administration did not resort to reprisals."

The Yale Administration's response was to turn to academic reprisal and intimidation. They singled out three teachers-Diana Paton (GRD '99), Cynthia Young (GRD '98), and Buju Dasgupta (GRD '98}-whose participation in the grade strike had been reported by senior professors, and began disciplinary proceedings. A lockout of the striking graduate teachers from spring semester courses was announced. President Levin told a Yale College faculty meeting that the faculty should work to separate graduate students from GESO, beginning a period of informal pressure from senior faculty advisors that continues to the present.

However, since most of the grade strike took place while the university was on break, the university press did not cover the remarkable groundswell of support for GESO from professors across the country. Hundreds of faculty members wrote letters and signed petitions calling on Yale to recognize GESO and end its reprisals. Two of the largest professional associations, the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, passed resolutions condemning the administration's actions.

Indeed the university's own Disciplinary Committee dismissed the serious charges against teachers--violating "a code of conduct that respeets the values and integrity of the academic community"-and found them "guilty" simply of disrupting university business and disobeying a professor.

T

he decision to end the grade suike was a difficult one; the members of GESO had to weigh the disciplinary actions, the responses of other members of the university, and the ongoing negotiations with Locals 34 and 35. GESO's compromise proposalthe call for a "memorandum of understanding" between the administration and the graduate student organization, and the withdrawal of the legal language of unions and contracts-was ruddy

dismissed by the Provost, even though this is the compromise that many faculty have been looking for.

Nonetheless, the fundamental issue remains: the right of graduate students to organize and their right to collective bargaining. How does the administration imagine Yale in three or five years? Do they really imagine that an independent graduate student organization will not be part of the landscape? As one colleague commented to me, the only way that could happen was if they stopped admitting graduate students until all public memory of GESO was erased. It is worth recalling that it took seventeen years for Yale's clerical and technical workers to win a union. From the 1967-68 organizing campaign of the Association of C&Ts to the 1984 strike of Local 34 of the Federation of University Employees, there were years of organizing against the determined opposition of the university administration.

For the crucial issue in any social movement is not the particular tactic, the grade strike, nor even the momentary settlement, the contract, but the organization itself: the h eart of GESO is the building and maintaining of a democratic, participatory organization which continues to represent the interests of graduate students and higher education generally.

GESO's success lies in its own organization. GESO's presence at Yale has made all of us rethink our common sense assumptions about universities, and has contributed immeasurably to education at Yale over the last few years. It is time for faculty, undergraduates, and administrators to join the members of the Federation of University Employees and stand up for GESO. With all its successes and failures, it is as much a part of Yale as the English department, the Whiffenpoofs, or The New journal.

1111

Michael Denning is dire~r ofundergraduate studies ofAmerican studies.

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