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Graduate-student employees marched through the rain Wednesday to take up some unfinished business with Yale’s new president.
The graduate students, who teach courses and conduct research as part of their tenure on campus, have been trying for years to gain union recognition at Yale. Yale President Peter Salovey’s predecessor, Rick Levin, opposed the move.
As with an earlier organizing drive at Yale, the ultimately successful 15-year quest to unionize clerical and technical workers, opponents have argued that a traditionally unrepresented group of workers doesn’t need union representation the way, say, factory workers did; while supporters have argued that anti-labor forces always disingenuously use that point to try to prevent new groups of exploited workers from seeking better conditions.
At Wednesday’s march, organizers from Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO-UNITE HERE) delivered a petition to Salovey’s office at Woodbridge Hall with the signatures of over 1,000 grad students. The petition calls for Yale to follow the example of New York University, which last December “voluntarily agreed to a process for graduate students to vote on union representation in an environment free of intimidation.” Grad students at NYU then voted overwhelmingly to form a union, which is now negotiating a first contract. University of Connecticut has since followed suite.
Leaders of other Yale UNITE HERE locals joined the march, as did Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn (at right in photo).
“We teach. We grade. We hold office hours. We oversee experiments. We do work,” GESO Chair Aaron Greenberg, who’s also a city alder representing Wooster Square, told the crowd filling Beinecke Plaza outside Woodbridge Hall. “The university trusts us to teach. They should trust us to negotiate over the conditions of our work.”
Click here to read the petition presented to Salovey. In addition to the unionization demand, it called for less sexual harassment in the workplace, higher and granting tenure to more women and people of color, and affordable and accessible health care for workers.
Asked for a response, Yale spokesman Tom Conroy issued this statement: “Yale University and the Graduate School have worked and will continue to work productively with faculty and students, including the Graduate Student Assembly, on the issues identified by the petition. We are committed to the best possible academic outcomes for our students.”
Click here to read a report on the march in the Yale Daily News.
The petition stretched 220 feet long, according to organizers.