“History Will Judge Yale Harshly”

Former federal prosecutor Chris Mattei, who’s exploring a run for the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, submitted the following opinion piece:

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.

Last week, I had the privilege of visiting with hunger-striking graduate teachers who are members of Local 33, UNITE HERE. Yale has refused to negotiate a first contract with the teachers even though they held a free, fair election and voted to form a union.

Critics, most prominent among them Yale administrators, have attempted to portray the graduate teachers as selfish individuals on the path to prestigious academic careers, benefiting from tuition waivers and stipends beyond the compensation they receive for teaching as apprentices. These critics attack the graduate teachers for invoking a false equivalence with other unionized Yale employees to promote their narrow self-interest.

The truth is exactly the opposite.

Every one of the graduate teachers with whom I spoke loved the teaching that they do, and valued how it enriched their own scholarship and that of their students. Every one of them also worried not only for themselves, but for their peers, about unpredictable and expanding teaching loads, the racial and gender inequities in teaching assignments and in pay, and the inadequacy of family health care, mental health care, and child care benefits that are so important for the security of all working families.

These graduate teachers and their forebears have rejected the stance encouraged by Yale and other elite academic institutions that their highly specialized intellectual labor is not really ​“work,” and that they should seek advancement by standing separate and apart from the other workers – groundskeepers and maintenance workers, clerical and technical workers – whose labor, like their own, keeps Yale running every day.

Instead, at the core of their identity, the graduate teachers have united themselves with the broader, historic movement of Yale workers to win decency and dignity for all of the university’s employees, and to use their power to make Yale, as New Haven’s largest and wealthiest employer, into a greater source of opportunity for the city and the region.

In fact, the solidarity of several generations of graduate teachers with the struggles of Yale’s other unionized employees played a critical role in securing those workers’ good wages and benefits, and breaking a long cycle of labor unrest including multiple strikes.

It is in this context, and in the context of Yale’s long refusal to recognize the graduate teachers union while supposedly awaiting – and in truth actively delaying – the federal government’s decision regarding these workers’ legal right to organize, that we should evaluate the university’s refusal to bargain now that Local 33 has been legally certified.

At this critical moment, when workers’ basic rights and protections face potentially devastating attacks from Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans, Yale is pursuing additional delays in the hopes that Trump appointees to the National Labor Relations Board will overturn the decision allowing the graduate teachers to organize.

This is an act of profound cynicism for which history will judge Yale harshly.

Now more than ever, when the norms and institutions of our democracy are threatened, we need the kind of unity that has been demonstrated by Yale’s graduate teachers, and reciprocated by their co-workers and the New Haven community, to provide us ​“a model for democratic culture,” as Yale Professor of History Jennifer Klein has called it.

These graduate teachers are part of a new democratic vitality rising in our state and Country. They are sacrificing their time, jeopardizing their education and professional opportunities, and taking on one of the most powerful institutions in the state so that people who come after them will be treated with fairness and dignity. In this sense, their struggle should be familiar to all of us who were raised to embrace that most basic American devotion – a willingness to sacrifice one’s own immediate interests in order to build a more just and equitable future for others.