Labor Paints Prospect Street With ​“Respect” Message

Armed with paint, roughly 150 organizers, union members, and New Haveners Saturday gathered to call on Yale to ​“pay their fair share” for tax-exempt properties and honor a local hiring commitment.

Participants delivered a petition to Peter Salovey’s office and painted ​“YALE: RESPECT NEW HAVEN” outside on Prospect Street.

The event also served as a precursor for a planned ​“5/5@5” rally on the corner of Prospect and Grove. Organizations will again demand greater voluntary contributions to the city, more jobs for New Haveners, and fair contract negotiations for Local 34 which represents clerical and technical workers at Yale.

Organizers issued a ​“demand that Yale University leaders partner with the city to undo 80 years of segregated development. The New Haven neighborhoods with the highest home-foreclosure rates after the Great Recession are today facing the highest Covid-19 infection rates and shortest life expectancies. Yale must help address these staggering inequities, especially given that New Haven sustains an annual $157 million tax break to the University and to Yale New Haven Hospital.”

Participants painted a 670-foot blue stripe on the street. That represented Yale’s $30 billion endowment. Next to it they painted a tiny red stripe representing Yale’s $13 million in annual voluntary contributions.

The events come at a time when activists are calling for Yale to increase its voluntary financial contributions to the city, the subject of negotiations between the university and a city task force headed by Henry Fernandez. The rallies also come as pressure begins to build around negotiations on a new contract for Yale’s unions; the current contracts expire in January. (Yale spokesperson Karen Peart released a statement in response to the event, which can be found below in this story.)

“My hope is always that New Haven and Yale University have a partnership and a way of communicating that could help the city. It is such a great university and so we’re out here to say ​‘support us in a bigger way’” said Beaver Hills Alder Brian Wingate, who serves as a vice-president of Local 35.

Wingate said Yale should step up specifically around affordable housing and negotiations on a new contract. ​“We need equality, we need fair wages, we need good jobs.”

The rally’s main speaker, Trinity College Davarian Baldwin professor, is the author of the book Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities. He argues that universities like Yale have become primarily real estate, health care, and biotech businesses that take advantage of their host communities rather than public-service educational institutions.

Local 34 staffer and Newhallville community leader Barbara Vereen said her goal is to secure more jobs for Newhallville residents in particular. ​“It has meant a lot to work here and to see these jobs evolve into really good-paying jobs where people can retire with dignity.”

Vereen, who has lived in New Haven since she was 3, said working at Yale was ​“life-changing” in being able to buy a home and put three sons through college. ​“I know if I want it for my kids, I know everybody else would want it. In Newhallville, our people are suffering. They need jobs they want to be able to take care of their kids. Everybody wants their American dream, and Yale can provide that here in New Haven. Imagine what that would do for the city.”

She said the union is looking to Yale to provide more opportunities for New Haveners by hiring from the city. ​“We’re asking Yale to pay their fair share, we’re asking Yale to honor their hiring commitment to New Haven, and we’re asking Yale to respect the unions and give them a fair contract so there can continue to be great jobs for people in New Haven and in the region.”

With more jobs for New Haven residents, she said she hopes for more after-school programs for kids, senior programs, and affordable housing as well. ​“They won’t have to corner themselves off from the rest of the city. Crime would be lower, downtown would be booming. Yale drives the market and they’re going to drive us right out of our neighborhood.”

Local 34 member Isaac Bloodworth, a Yale Center For British Art museum technician, spoke about recently losing two people to Covid-19. After these deaths, he had 20 hours of bereavement pay. ​“I was expected to pick up and move on as though nothing had happened. But we can’t afford to pretend this year didn’t happen. We need to acknowledge the pain and trauma we have experienced and take concrete steps to heal.”

Bloodworth noted the ties Benjamin Silliman, the namesake for one of Yale’s residential colleges, had to slavery. He said that last year Yale got a tax break of $1.8 million for Silliman. ​“I work on a campus where buildings are named after a man who owned enslaved people, and I also live in a city that’s been forced to keep those buildings tax-exempt.”

Yale physics graduate student and Local 33 lead organizer Kimberly Cushman criticized Yale’s role in exacerbating and causing inequalities in the city. ​“Yale is spending tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars renovating and building new buildings. But in contract negotiations with locals 34 and 35, they are trying to set back the wages and make historic cuts to wages and benefits of their workers,” Cushman argued.

“When we’re discussing where we’re lacking and what we need to be putting money into, slowly I’ve been learning that Yale has a lot to do with why we are so underfunded,” said Cooperative Arts and Humanities (Co-Op) High School student Liza Mishel.

As a New Haven public school student, Mishel said she has been connected with Yale through a number of programs. ​“But then you quickly realize that they’re still not doing good things so it makes you not want to have a relationship with them.”

Mishel said she wants Yale to pay their fair share to fund social workers for schools. ​“We need people who can deal with mental illness issues so we can prevent all this unnecessary policing going on.”
Senior at Co-Op Jamila Washington said she has many friends who plan to move out of New Haven next year because of a lack of opportunity to build and grow. ​“There aren’t many jobs for youth especially outside of food and retail.”

Washington said she plans to stay in New Haven and push for more opportunities for young people. ​“But I know that won’t be possible if Yale doesn’t pay its fair share.”

“As a young person in New Haven, I’ve seen the impact of Yale’s tax break on the youth and students. There isn’t funding for extracurriculars and we can’t afford help for our studies. The pandemic has made these problems worse” she added.

“Right before our eyes colleges and universities have become the real estate barons, the biotech moguls, the healthcare hustlers,” Professor Baldwin said in addressing the crowd.

Baldwin called Yale’s nonprofit status a ​“public good paradox” that enables it to exploit New Haven” ​“It’s because of claims of serving the public good that the university is able to extract wealth, dollars, resources, and labor to generate their private interest without any public oversight.”

“The economic prosperity of the $30 billion that comes and sits on this campus is directly extracted from the neighborhoods that surround this campus.”

Concluding the event, Ice The Beef Latino Caucus President Manuel Camacho introduced and read aloud a ​“Yale: Respect New Haven” petition before delivering it to Salovey’s office. He said that 40 community and campus organizations signed in support.

“This petition represents a deep consensus from New Haven. If leaders at Yale do not get the message from this petition, they will now have this street painting to remind them that our community demands respect,” Camacho said.

Yale: Looking Forward To “Creative Solutions”

Following is a statement released by Yale spokesperson Karen Peart in response to Saturday’s event:

Yale formed a partnership in 2004 with its two largest unions, Local 34 and Local 35 , which now represent more than 5,000 employees at Yale. Since then the University has engaged in many collaborations with the two unions and settled three labor agreements through early peaceful negotiations. Throughout the pandemic we have drawn on this partnership, working closely with Locals 34 and 35 to manage through many issues such as safety in the workplace, new workplace policies, new assignments, and remote work arrangements. During the pandemic, the University has taken extraordinary measures to insulate staff from the economic impacts of COVID with an eye toward the important positive impact such measures could have on the New Haven economy. These steps include:

· No staff were laid off as a direct result of Yale’s COVID-19 response.
· Yale provided premium (1.5x) pay to staff required to work on campus from March 16, 2020 through June 7, 2020. 
· Yale provided full pay and benefits to staff who were able to work remotely even if they were not at full capacity (e.g., a percentage of their workload was temporarily suspended because of COVID). In such case, Yale, through its Talent Share Program, worked to connect underutilized staff to alternate assignments.  Even if alternate assignments were not identified, staff continued to receive full pay and benefits. 
· Yale provided full pay and benefits for almost a year for more than 200 staff who could not report to campus due to elevated risk associated with COVID (staff who are 65+ years of age and/or have underlying health conditions).  This group consisted of staff members who must perform their jobs on campus (e.g., custodians and dining services staff, C&T staff assigned to labs, security officers).
· Yale provided full pay and benefits to underutilized Hospitality staff who could have been laid off or furloughed because of lack of work.  Such staff have been reassigned to Facilities to assist with high touch cleaning, they also have been utilized as greeters at vaccination and testing sites, etc. 
· Yale provided full pay and benefits to staff members required to quarantine or isolate because of COVID exposures or infections.

As required by a bargaining timeline in the 2017 contract with Locals 34 and 35, Yale is currently in bargaining for a 2022 contract renewal and looks forward to continuing productive discussions seeking creative solutions to both parties interests.