Yale Unions Celebrate Jobs Pact

Hundreds of local labor leaders, politicians, and rank-and-file union members filled First & Summerfield Church to celebrate the signing of a new agreement with Yale that creates over a dozen permanent job training and hiring programs targeted at New Haven residents from ​“neighborhoods of need.”

The new university-labor deal was announced late Monday afternoon at a joy-filled, gospel-backed meeting of UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35, the politically influential clerical and technical worker and blue collar unions at Yale. The meeting was hosted by the local labor advocacy group, New Haven Rising.

Local 35 President Bob Proto and Local 34 President Laurie Kennington said that just several days ago union leadership and Yale administrators agreed to the final terms of a new written commitment from the university to create 16 job training, apprenticeship, and hiring programs targeted at New Haven’s primarily working-class, African American and Hispanic neighborhoods, such as Dixwell, Fair Haven, Newhallville, and the Hill.

The university has also committed to hiring an additional 300 full-time employees from those ​“neighborhoods of need,” building off of the 300 people from those neighborhoods whom the university has already hired following its 2015 jobs agreement with the unions.

Proto, Kennington, and Local 34 Secretary-Treasurer Ken Suzuki stressed Monday night that the new agreement builds off that original, time-limited hiring commitment, which union members slammed the university for not meeting earlier this year, by creating the pathways necessary for local residents to acquire needed skills to become viable candidates for these jobs in the first place. This new document fills in the ​“how,” Suzuki said, to complement the earlier agreement’s focus on the number of people to be hired.

“Our unions have fought for 70 years to make sure that jobs at Yale are high-quality jobs,” Kennington said, ​“and we have been fighting for decades to make sure that New Haven residents can get those jobs.” This new agreement brings the unions closer to realizing those goals than ever before.

Yale has ​“started to wake up and started to realize that this community needs some help, that this city needs some help,” Proto added.

This new agreement has language ​“that doesn’t sunset, that lives on in perpetuity and that gives ongoing avenues of opportunity to neighborhoods of need.”

The terms of the agreement, as described Monday night by Proto, Kennington, Suzuki, and New Haven Works lead labor organizer Scott Marks, include the following commitments:

• Yale will hire 300 full-time employees from the city’s neighborhoods of need by the end of 2021.

• Yale will work with Local 35 to create a new licensed trades apprentice program for local residents interested in becoming plumbers, electricians, glaziers, and HVAC maintenance workers, a new licensed trades vocational-tech program in collaboration with the Eli Whitney Technical School, and a new unlicensed skilled trades apprentice program for local residents interested in becoming painters, masons, and carpenters.

• Yale will pay $4,000 in tuition costs per student per year for New Haven Works members from neighborhoods of need interested in earning a degree from Gateway in a field relevant to a Local 34 clerical and technical workers job. Yale will also provide a $1,000 annual stipend per pupil for students in that program, and will hire 75 percent of graduates from that Yale-Local 34-New Haven Works-Gateway collaboration.

• Yale will fund an updated version of the New Haven Residents Training Program, first created by the Yale unions in the 1990s, and will extend the same hiring priority benefits to New Haven Works members from neighborhoods of need as it currently provides to Local 34 and 35 members through the contract-mandated layoff pool.

• Yale and Local 35 will create a new cook’s apprentice program through the Yale dining hall system, and will expand Yale Catering to more local residents interested in full-time food service jobs.

• Yale will ensure that major contractors hired to do multimillion-dollar construction projects on campus hire a certain percentage of local residents for every job. ​“We convinced Yale of their leverage with these big, big general contractors,” Proto said. These contractors ​“are going to be using some New Haven people now.”

Yale has all too often looked elsewhere in Connecticut, and in the country, to recruit and hire its employees, Proto said. This agreement will not only encourage Yale to hire from around the corner, but will make sure that people in this city are qualified for the jobs waiting be filled.

A host of local politicians, from Mayor Toni Harp to State Sen. Martin Looney to roughly half of the Board of Alders, joined in for the hour-plus celebratory round of speeches. They all hailed the power of private-sector labor unions to raise the the quality of life for people of color, low-income people, and other traditionally overlooked by major employers like Yale.

“Saying it doesn’t make it so,” Harp said. ​“It takes a movement. … New Haven is an extraordinary city, and this movement is an exceptional part of it.”

Looney described the decline in private sector-union membership with the loss of manufacturing jobs in cities like New Haven as ​“a cancer in our system.” The son of a former union steward at the old Winchester Repeating Arms Company, Looney said he saw firsthand how much of a difference union pay, union healthcare, union pensions, and union job security make in a person’s life.

Elidia Lezama, a recently hired custodian at Yale who is also in Local 35, shared a similar story about her own path to full-time employment at Yale.

Lezama said she moved to this country five years ago, and spent her first several years in New Haven working multiple part-time custodian jobs. At times, she worked less than 10 hours a week, and made as little as $25 in one pay period.

“As a single mom of two kids,” she said, “$25 wasnt enough for me.”

Then, at one of her part-time jobs, she met a woman who told her about the union-affiliated job training services New Haven Works.

At New Haven Works, a job coach helped her improve her resume, practice interviews, and craft job applications. She enrolled in a custodial training course at Yale, became a trainee for six months, and then landed a full-time jobs with benefits.

“Now i can tell you that my life has changed so much,’ she said. ​“Now, I have only one job, enough time for my kids, with benefits, vacations, and I can stay home if one of my kids gets sick, and get paid still.”

Suzuki said that Local 34 entry-level jobs start at $23 per hour. Proto said that the skilled Local 35 jobs start at $42 per hour. When taking into account both salaries and benefits, they said, Yale union jobs are some of the best of their kind in the state.

But don’t be fooled by all the celebration and joyous music, Marks said.

“The contract is only as good as the paper it’s written on if you’re not willing to work and enforce it.”

Kennington said that, for now, this new signed agreement exists independent of Local 34 and Local 35’s existing contracts with the university. However, she sad, when the next round of contract negotiations begins, union leadership plans on pushing for these terms’ inclusion in the contracts themselves.

Representatives from Yale did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full event.