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Ramesh: Victory “feels more possible” now.
While preparing to lead a class on democracy in India this semester, Hari Ramesh took time out to join his fellow graduate students Monday in seeking to bring democracy to New Haven.
Newly minted as official “workers” under the law, Ramesh and other graduate students who teach undergraduate courses in 10 Yale departments formally signed authorization cards seeking union recognition filed Monday with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
They seek to have UNITE HERE Local 33 recognized as their union to bargain on their behalf with the university. Eight hundred graduate students study and teach in those 10 departments, said Local 33 Chair Aaron Greenberg.
The filing follows last week’s NLRB ruling that graduate- student teachers at Columbia — and therefore in general at private universities — are considered both students and teachers under the law. Yale has refused to negotiate with organizers under the argument that they’re students, not workers. The university has also argued that a union would spoil the mentor-mentee relationship between students and faculty and jeopardize classroom free speech, arguments that the NLRB decision dismissed as contrary to the findings of independent research. (You can download the full decision at this page.)
“It made things feel more possible,” Ramesh, a Boston-born fourth-year political science PhD student who studies the history of democracy in India and the U.S., said of the NLRB ruling, which overturned an earlier ruling concerning organizing at Brown University.
Yale’s graduate students have been trying since 1990 in conjunction with UNITE HERE (the parent union of Yale’s pink-collar and blue-collar Locals 34 and 35) to unionize. The NLRB ruling is seen as a boost to similar campaigns nationwide.
“Our members who clean Yale’s classrooms have a say in their working conditions,” a UNITE HERE release quoted Local 35 President Bob Proto as saying. “It’s past time for the people who teach in those classrooms to have a voice too.”
“We are ready to sit down and negotiate a fair and collegial process. They know where we are. They have not approached us” yet, Greenberg said in an interview.
Asked for a response Monday to the filing, Yale spokesman Tom Conroy replied: “We think it’s better for all the students to have a say on the issue.”
“Yale continues to disagree with the NLRB decision and does not support a graduate student union,” Conroy added. “GESO seeking an election among a subset of graduate students does not change the university’s longstanding viewpoint.”
Monday’s petition was submitted by student teachers in the following Yale departments: Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, Geology and Geophysics, History, History of Art, Mathematics, Physics, Political Science, and Sociology. Greenberg said between 75 and 100 percent of the graduate students in each of those departments are Local 33 members.
In the past, Yale and the Local 33 organizers (formerly under the banner of GESO, or Graduate Employees and Students Organization,) have disagreed over which departments to include in any potential unionizing election. Yale has pushed to include a wider array of departments, including those with less pro-union sentiment. At one point GESO held a mock election in which it chose the participating departments; a majority of those voting cast ballots against unionization.
Greenberg Monday cited precedents — a 2011 NLRB in the Specialty Healthcare case, and U.S. Court of Appeals decisions in a series of cases including FedEx Freight, Inc. — supporting a “department-by-department” approach to establishing a bargaining unit in the smallest rather than broadest scope.
Turning Point?
Leading politicians statewide, including Gov. Dannel P. Malloy (shown making a pro-GESO speech at a 2014 rally), have embraced the Yale graduate student organizing drive. On campus, the drive has also met some resistance on the left. A group of “women, LGBTQ graduate students, and graduate students of color at Yale University” released this letter earlier this year that expressed sympathy with the drive’s goals but criticizing “troubling behaviors we see encouraged by union leadership and practiced across the organization.”
Mayor Toni Harp Monday predicted the NLRB decision will help union organizers and Yale to find common ground on rules for proceeding with an election.
“Over the years I’ve heard Yale said if the NLRB basically sees [graduate student employees] as workers — which is different than the university sees them —then they recognize that a union can be formed. My sense is they have been negotiating around what neutrality will look like” in an organizing campaign,” Harp said on WNHH radio’s “Mayor Monday” program. “They’re trying to come up with language to define what that neutrality means.”
Monday’s filing came as no surprise to one labor expert, Kate Bronfenbrenner. She predicted that in the wake of the NLRB ruling, more private universities besides just New York University will see graduate student unions, following in the footsteps of public universities. Cornell Unviersity, where Bronfenbrenner is director of labor research, agreed this summer to a card-count neutrality agreement for a graduate student organizing drive. That means the school will recognize the union if a majority of affected graduate-student teachers sign membership cards.
“I think it’s going to happen,” Bronfenbrenner said of the prospects of a successful Yale drive. She predicted similar victories at Harvard and Brown. In general, she predicted the first wave of union victories will occur at campuses in cities, with more students of color and more community support.
“Yale has been a long, long fight. Yale dug in its heels. Yale has done everything possible to not want to recognize the union. But their excuse was always that they couldn’t — it was against the law. And now that excuse is gone [with the NLRB ruling]. The playing field has changed. That means that all the pressure on the Yale board, all the pressure from the Yale community, all the pressure external to Yale, changes.”
From Gandhi To New Haven
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Local 33 members at a recent demonstration.
Yale graduate students have cited a range of concerns they seek to address through a union contract and negotiations with the administration. The concerns include reduced pay for seventh- and eighth-year PhD student teachers; access to mental health and other health services; the composition of the faculty and undergraduate curriculum; and affordable child care. “We have some members who pay more than half their monthly income for child care, because Yale offers no child care,” Aaron Greenberg said. “People are being punished for being parents.” (The second half of this previous story features interviews with graduate-student teachers about their reasons for supporting the organizing drive.)
Hari Ramesh noted that eight of 11 faculty members in South Asian Studies whom Yale hired from 2006 to 2014 have either left the university or are planning to. He praised the faculty members with whom he works in the political science department; he sees “less institutional support” in South Asian Studies. He criticized “Yale’s long tenure clock,” with too many “people being denied promotion.”
Ramesh, who is 27 years old, said he received a $28,500 annual stipend to study at Yale. This semester he will teach two 15-student undergraduate sections of a course on Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and nonviolent politics. He serves as a member of Local 33’s elected coordinating committee.
“Democracy operates in a number of different spaces” in society, including elections, but not only in elections, he observed. In coming months he will not only teach about that, but learn more about how it works firsthand.