While Yale students were handed degrees Monday, graduate student teachers two blocks away were handed cups of ginger and butternut soup to end, at least for now, a nationally watched protest fast.
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Union backers wore orange, Yale grads black in Monday’s processions.
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Sarah Decker |
May 22, 2017 10:20 am
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Sarah Decker, pictured at front right.
(Opinion) On Monday morning, I marched in the streets of New Haven with thousands of members of my union and our allies, calling for Yale to begin contract negotiations. Then I put my cap and gown on over my orange union t‑shirt, and went to receive my PhD.
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Markeshia Ricks |
May 17, 2017 7:42 am
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Union supporters Tuesday night with new metal sign on Beinecke.
Members of UNITEHERE Local 33 and their supporters continued to show their mettle in the fight to have their new graduate student teachers union recognized by Yale University, as their encampment got some actual metal just in time for graduation.
While news headlines focus on the pitched struggle to resolve our fiscal crisis in Hartford, there is another important clash over the character of Connecticut taking place along the shoreline, at Yale University in New Haven.
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Markeshia Ricks & Lucy Gellman |
May 11, 2017 12:35 pm
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Protesters block the intersection of Elm and York Thursday.
The eight Yale graduate students sitting back-to-back in a circle at the intersection of Elm and York streets had a few options: They could do as the officers requested and get out of the street. They could stay and be ticketed. Or like some of their colleagues simultaneously blocking Church and Chapel and at College and Grove streets, they could be taken into custody.
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Markeshia Ricks |
May 10, 2017 12:08 pm
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Rosa DeLauro, Toni Harp, and Tyisha Walker wheel Decker, Sessions and Moe to Woodbridge Hall.
After two weeks putting nothing more than water into their stomachs, three of the original eight graduate teachers still fasting to press Yale to negotiate with their union mustered the energy to ask their employer: How much longer?
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Markeshia Ricks |
May 9, 2017 7:59 am
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Robyn Porter and Josh Elliott, State Sen. Gary Winfield at forum.
State Rep. Josh Elliott had a question for the crowd of progressive activists: Would they rather see legislators stand their ground on a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and risk no movement on minimum wage should it fail? Or should legislators support a compromise bill to raise the wage incrementally to, say, $11.25?
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Markeshia Ricks |
May 5, 2017 5:21 pm
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Members of Local 33 and retired members of Locals 34 and 35 march out of Yale SOM Friday.
A graduate teacher union that is gaining notoriety for its ability to embarrass its nemesis pulled one more trick from up its sleeves Friday as its members unfurled a very larger banner inside the Yale University School of Management.
The banner had just two words on it: Trump University.
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Markeshia Ricks |
May 4, 2017 7:35 am
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New Haven Rising’s Scott Marks shows off his hopscotch skills.
Members of UNITEHERE Local 33 didn’t have energy for much on the eighth day of a fast to push Yale University to the negotiating table, but the young and the young at heart made up the difference.
Melissa Etheridge, who broke onto the charts with her 1988 single “Bring Me Some Water,” carried an armload of Fiji bottles onto Beinecke Plaza on Tuesday afternoon.
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Christopher Peak |
May 2, 2017 7:35 am
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Luis Barrios and his family, along with UNITE HERE, lead the protest down Elm Street.
Hundreds of protesters roared outside an Elm Street nail salon accused of underpaying its immigrant workers, while the shop’s manager leaned on a parking meter and filmed the scene through his smartphone.
Nursing student Aliza Kreisman checks faster Robin Canavan’s vital signs.
While graduate student demonstrators diverted the cops’ attention at two other locations, 30 supporters of a union protest fast slipped onto Yale’s Beinecke Plaza and swiftly erected a 25-foot-tall structure that has become a festive “Occupy Wall Street”-style gathering spot — and a headache for the university.
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Thomas Hille |
May 1, 2017 4:40 pm
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U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro visiting the protest encampment.
(Opinion) Just last month an Italian journalist — who was illegally detained — was released from a Turkish prison after a six-day hunger strike, nine nurses in the Mexican state of Chiapas — who were drawing attention to shortages of supplies and demanded the payment of wages and retirement payments — ended a 10-day hunger strike, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners declared an indefinite hunger strike in Israel, and eight Yale graduate students declared an indefinite fast.
The rationale behind the latter hunger strike does not compare by any standard to any hunger strike known to me, it is a distasteful show of self-righteousness masked as a selfless sacrifice of eight martyrs for the apparent greater good of graduate students in eight departments.
This alternative hunger strike might come across as comical at first, but it is not, it makes a mockery of a “path that many others have [traveled before],” to quote Aaron Greenberg.
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Thomas Breen |
Apr 29, 2017 8:53 pm
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DeLauro joins the Local 33 fasters and their supporters in Beinecke Plaza.
On the fifth day of a graduate student-teacher fast taking place at the heart of Yale University, the sun-dazed but spirited protesters received a visit of support from a U.S. congressperson with deep roots in New Haven labor history.
On the second day of protest, fasters said their hunger pangs had grown far more painful.
Yale graduate student teachers have a right to a union, but their most recent protest fast might not be the best method to obtain one, in the view of a candidate seeking to represent the campus on New Haven’s Board of Alders.
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Aaron Greenberg |
Apr 28, 2017 7:09 am
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Aaron Greenberg.
Eight members of UNITEHERE Local 33, the new union representing some graduate student teachers at Yale, announced Tuesday that they have launched a hunger strike to try to convince the university to negotiate a first contract. One of the eight, union Chair Aaron Greenberg (who’s also a Wooster Square alder), offers his reasons in the following article. Click here and here for background on both sides of the dispute.
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Christopher Peak |
Apr 27, 2017 7:42 am
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Faster Charles Decker gets a checkup from Aliza Kreisman.
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Local 33 fasters, supporters at newly erected protest structure Wednesday night on Beinecke Plaza.
Robin Canavan could smell dinner being prepared inside the Commons dining hall steps away. “Maybe,” she said with tinge of regret, “we should have had a cheeseburger right before.”
Yale’s Lauren Zucker with Bean’s Gull, Mayor Harp, Bruce Alexander.
The name of the retailer that will occupy the two floors of retail space beneath Yale University’s future grad student housing on Elm Street was so top secret that even the mayor wasn’t told before the big unveiling.
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Markeshia Ricks |
Apr 20, 2017 8:09 am
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Jose Crespo and Darryl Brackeen: two sides of the public safety coin.
From the lectern, Upper Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen Jr. recalled the time a New Haven police officer grabbed him and yelled at him about riding a red mountain bike.
Coffin (at desk), with other original members of the co-op.
Doug Coffin loves the idea of a new food co-op in New Haven, like the one that opened in the late 1960s and closed in the 1980s. But he doubts people have the interest in “putting in the time and effort that’s needed to sustain such a place” anymore.
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Markeshia Ricks |
Apr 19, 2017 7:55 am
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The Board of Fire Commissioners promoted 12 new fire captains and 12 lieutenants, but there could be more promotions to those ranks for two very different reasons: a lawsuit by one firefighter, and pending negotiations with the fire union for staffing changes.
