Paul Bass Photo
From the governor on down, top Connecticut Democrats joined well over 1,000 New Haveners in taking over a block of College Street Tuesday night to jump-start a revival of the quest to unionize Yale’s graduate-student teachers.
A boisterous crowd estimated at 2,000 filled the street to endorse a call on Yale to negotiate with the Graduate Employees And Students Organization (GESO), which claims to represent more than 1,000 masters and PhD students in the arts and sciences who earn money teaching undergraduate courses or working in research labs. The crowd watched as supporters unveiled a block-long banner …
… festooned with the photos of 2,000 students, workers, and politicians supporting the unionization call. Yale’s graduate students have been trying to form a union through GESO for more than 20 years. Two recent victories by similar union-organizing drives, at New York University and the University of Connecticut, recharged the organizing drive at Yale (beginning with this event in May). An earlier wave of GESO organizing in the 1990s and early 2000s failed to achieve union recognition, but did see improved pay and benefits for graduate-student teachers. (Yale denied a connection between the organizing drive and the changes.)
Addressing the College Street crowd Tuesday night from atop a Teamsters Union flatbed truck, speakers included U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (at left), State Treasurer Denise Nappier (center), State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney (at right), and State Comptroller Kevin Lembo (concealed behind Looney).
In declining to bargain with GESO, the Yale administration has argued — and continues to argue — that, as spokesman Tom Conroy put it Tuesday, “Yale considers the graduate students to be primarily students, not employees.” DeLauro offered her take on that argument in thundering remarks to the crowd Tuesday night: “Whether you are a factory worker or a graduate student, you have a right to organize … and to bargain and have a say in your wages and your salary and your working conditions.”
“GESO — you are workers. The work you do is important,” Tyisha Walker told the crowd. Walker (pictured after delivering her remarks) is secretary treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 35, which represents Yale’s blue-collar workers; and a West River alder. She responded to the second, less-spoken case opponents have made against GESO in its earlier incarnation: That Yale’s blue-collar and pink-collar unionized workers will show up at rallies for the graduate students in order to earn their return support in contract battles with the university, but they’ll never risk their own jobs and go out on strike for GESO. “We stand with you,” Walker declared.
The crowd also heard from a veteran of NYU’s graduate-student organizing drive, Lily DeFriend, who studies anthropology. Before her speech she said that the drive at NYU succeeded after gaining the support of faculty members and repeated demonstrations of overwhelming support of the bargaining unit. (DeFriend is on the bargaining committee of the NYU union, GSOC/UAW.)
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was the star attraction at Tuesday’s rally, because he’s currently in the midst of the Connecticut’s closest high-stakes race, with organized labor working hard to reelect him. Democrat Malloy desperately needs the support of both New Haven in general and Yale’s unions in particular to win Nov. 4’s too-close-to-call rematch with Republican Tom Foley. Yale union vote-pullers were crucial to delivering the city’s 18,606-plus victory margin for Malloy in the 2010 election, an election he won statewide by only 6,404 votes.
Malloy rattled off his labor credentials for the crowd: “another 20,000 people” represented by unions statewide since he took office; the passage of the country’s first $10.10-per-hour minimum wage; passage of the country’s first paid sick leave law; passage of a state earned income tax credit. (Click on the video to watch speech highlights.) “The next thing on our agenda is you,” Malloy called out. “Let’s get the job done. God bless you. And by the way, don’t forget to vote.”
After the speeches, the crowd marched en masse down Wall Street …
… to the steps of Yale’s administration building, Woodbridge Hall, where Wooster Square Alder and GESO Chair Aaron Greenberg (a political science grad student) and fellow GESO organizers brought binders filled with copies of all those 2,000 photos of supporters …
… which they delivered to Yale Director of Administrative Affairs Pilar Montalvo, who works in the president’s office.
What’s At Stake
In a pre-rally interview earlier Tuesday in Yale’s Rosenkrantz Hall, GESO-affiliated graduate student-teachers described the concerns they’d press with the university through union recognition. The concerns had to do with both the teachers’ work conditions as well as the quality of education for the Yale undergraduates whom they teach. Political science doctoral student Charles Decker spoke of pushing the university to hire more professors of color. “There aren’t a lot of people who look like me” on the faculty, he said. “Yale is a leader in higher education. If I could negotiate with them to make a strong commitment to diversity, that would make a Yale education that much” better.
Robin Canavan (at far left in photo), meanwhile, spoke of the need for “more women faculty to look up to as role models” in the sciences. She does lab and field work in geology and geophysics.
Evan Pease, a physicist, spoke of how lab researchers like himself (he’s “pursuing a new particle” through studying dark-matter detection) rely on federal-government grants, which are dwindling. Through GESO he’d look to negotiate job protection when grants run out.
Allison Hadley, who teachers elementary Italian to undergrads, noted that Yale is building two new residential colleges that will house another 800 or so students on campus. Will the university hire enough grad students to teach them, or will classes get bigger? She’d like to see grad students represented through a union when that question gets answered.
Abbey Agresta (pictured) spoke of learning as she showed up to deliver the second lecture in one course that she’d been suddenly transferred to teach a different course instead. “I deserve a voice in that decision-making,” she said.
University spokesman Conroy said graduate-student teachers’ views are already part of the decision-making process at Yale, through the Graduate Student Assembly. In an email message, he also listed the arrangements and benefits for graduate-student teachers: “The doctoral students’ financial aid package includes five years of funding and free health care. The support includes a full fellowship covering the $37,600 annual tuition and provides minimum annual stipends ranging from $28,400 to $33,000. The faculty of the Graduate School believe that training in pedagogy is integral to the professional development of graduate students. Most students, therefore, assist in teaching one course per term, normally between 2 to 4 terms during the first five years of study.” Conroy stated that Yale is committed to the best possible academic outcomes for our students.”