Albright.
(Opinion) On Thursday, approximately 300 Yale graduate students, teaching fellows in nine departments across campus, will vote on whether Local 33, a union affiliated with UNITE HERE, will represent them in contract negotiations with the University. I am not eligible to vote, because although I am pursuing a Ph.D. in the Physics department, one of the departments whose teachers are eligible to vote, I am not currently teaching in Physics. However, if I could vote, I would be voting “no” on Local 33.
I do not take this position lightly. I care deeply about improving graduate student life, and Local 33 claims it will be fighting for many of the issues about which I am passionate. But through my experience as a representative on the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA), and on the Graduate & Professional Student Title IX Advisory Board, and speaking at length with Local 33 organizers, I have come to the conclusion that Local 33 is wholly unfit for contract negotiations with Yale, and electing this union will ultimately be counter to graduate students’ best interests.
While this critique concentrates primarily on Local 33’s inability to improve graduate students’ lives, many other complaints have motivated my opposition as well. Local 33 has a long history of harassing students for support, and the petitioned-for elections represent only a small fraction, approximately 10 percent, of the entire graduate school, denying most students a voice in a decision that will undoubtedly affect them.
These shortcomings have been well documented in the Yale Daily News, DOWN magazine, and other publications over the last 20 years. However, Local 33’s lack of awareness about the very issues for which it claims to fight has been less discussed. As an example of Local 33’s unpreparedness, I focus on its position on one particular issue, promoting racial and gender equity on campus.
Local 33 claims it will fight in negotiations to ensure racial and gender equity. While this is certainly a goal worth fighting for, the propositions for how Local 33 would achieve this are unconvincing. Organizers have argued that the union provides a community of support for graduate students facing inequality because of their identity. They have also told us that grievance procedures, written into our contract, would prevent sexual harassment and racial discrimination. I agree that these are important components to ensuring an equitable community, but they are far from enough.
Local 33 wrongly denies that Yale already provides mechanisms for support and adjudication. Communities and offices exist on campus to provide any support a student may be looking for, from the cultural centers to the Chaplain’s Office, and from the Office of Graduate Student Development & Diversity to the SHARE Center. Yale also has myriad grievance procedures already in place to address inequalities in the workplace: the Title IX Office and University Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct address inequality and misconduct based on students’ gender or sexuality, and the Office for Equal Opportunity Programs addresses instances of inequality or discrimination based on race.
Claiming support mechanisms do not exist at Yale when they demonstrably do is not only against graduate students’ best interests – students in need may not seek out resources if they don’t believe they exist – but also distracting from the deeper reasons for lingering racial and gender inequality on campus, and the actions that must be taken to address them. Many of the offices previously mentioned are already taking action in a positive way – they provide fellowships, mentoring, and programming that promotes an equitable campus. These projects may not make stirring rally cries, but the space between providing a community and guaranteeing grievance procedures is where the progress is truly made. Local 33 has done nothing to convince me it understands this, so I have no faith that this union will be able to improve equality within the graduate school through contract negotiations.
My lack of faith in Local 33’s ability to negotiate on issues runs throughout its platform. Improving healthcare has been another primary goal of Local 33, particularly providing better mental health care and expanding the dental plan. Yet organizers have ignored recent improvements to Yale Mental Health & Counseling and are unaware of how our current dental plan is negotiated. Childcare is another priority, but Local 33’s position neglects the details of how it could be improved. Subsidies would help graduate student parents, but spots in New Haven childcare facilities are already scarce. And building a facility especially for graduate students, as has been suggested, would be a massive endeavor, hardly a reasonable expectation out of contract negotiations for only 300 students.
I oppose Local 33 because it will be unable to improve graduate students’ lives in our contract, and its ignorance distracts from real solutions to our problems and hinders others who are working towards them. The core mission of student government at Yale, the Graduate Student Assembly and Graduate & Professional Student Senate, has been to tackle problems graduate students face, and they have already been working to find solutions. However, much of that work has been put on hold this year because of the unionization fight. Contract negotiations will only continue to slow the real progress existing student government can make.
The bottom line for graduate students is this: Local 33 has not made the effort to truly understand the issues that graduate students face every day. It has the talking point version, but little real substance. Local 33 will only be able to provide graduate students advocacy we already have, but at a lower quality. We deserve better of our representation and of our union. I strongly encourage students voting on Thursday to vote “no” on Local 33, and to demand more from those who seek to represent us.
Stephen Albright is a fourth-year graduate student in the Physics Department at Yale University. He can be reached at stephen.albright@yale.edu.