“Respect” Signs Posted, Explained

Tiffany Jones is ​“one of the one thousand,” she says — one of the employees Yale recruited as part of a promise to hire New Haven residents within three years of April 2015. Now Jones has been helping put up signs across the city to pressure Yale to make good on that promise for other New Haveners seeking employment.

Jones, a delivery assistant at the Smilow Cancer Center (where the university has an office), has been canvassing with UNITE HERE union activists for the past three weeks, asking neighbors to put up ​“Yale: Respect New Haven” signs in their windows and front lawns.

Hundreds of the signs have been popping up all over town — and leading to some confusion about what exactly they mean.

On Saturday morning, she was joined by Barbara Vereen, a Chief Steward for Local 34 who worked at Yale Medicine’s patient registration department, and Abby Feldman, a New Haven Rising organizer, as they knocked on doors up and down a stretch of Butler Street in Newhallville and offered an explanation.

“We’re here to talk about the jobs crisis in New Haven,” Jones said to one Butler Street resident who opened the door. She rapidly explained that in April, 2015, Yale had promised to hire 1,000 New Haven residents within three years. Five hundred of those new hires were supposed to come from ​“neighborhoods of need.”

“We want to hold Yale accountable for those jobs,” she said.

She repeated a version of this pitch several times throughout the morning to the handful of residents who answered the door.

In February, Yale reported in a presentation to the Board of Alders Black and Hispanic Caucus that it had hired 2,590 New Haven residents since 2015 — and soon corrected that number to 1,160, subtracting post-docs.

At that meeting, which drew a crowd of hundreds of concerned residents, the Caucus contested Yale’s choice to count short-term journeyman positions in construction work towards the promise. Alders brought the total number of New Haven hires down to 876 — 273 of whom came from the ​“neighborhoods of need.”

In a June op-ed in the New Haven Register, Yale President Peter Salovey maintained that Yale had hired over 1,000 employees from New Haven since 2015. ​“We are still working hard to achieve our goal of hiring 500 residents from our lowest-income neighborhoods,” he wrote.

Jones grew up in Newhallville, one of the ​“neighborhoods of need” that Yale pledged to target. She got a job at Yale in 2016 with the help of New Haven Works, a program that guides New Haveners through the job application process at Yale. She started out with a temporary position at Sterling Memorial Library. Soon, she got a phone call about the opportunity to work at the Smilow Cancer Center.

“I heard that p‑word — permanent,” Jones said. She accepted the offer. As a delivery assistant, she transports patients’ medical samples for testing. ​“It’s really rewarding,” she said. The job changed her life, she told one of the Butler Street residents.

Jones said that many of the people she’s spoken to over the past three weeks have heard of Yale’s hiring commitment and support the union’s efforts.

Lisa Kellman, the first resident to answer the door, was one of those people.

“I’m not too thrilled with the city right now because I think it was up to them to hold Yale accountable,” she said.

She asked to join the unions’ newsletter and told the group to plant a sign in the red mulch of her front lawn, where it would be most visible.

Not everyone who answered the door immediately agreed with the canvassers.

“You could have all the opportunities you want. If the individual doesn’t have the work ethic,” that person won’t get the job, argued one woman who declined to give her name.

“The kids who are committed are suffering alongside the kids who aren’t,” Vereen insisted.

“People are banging on the doors in North Haven trying to get a job at Amazon,” the woman said.

“Because they can’t get jobs in their own city!” Vereen responded.

“A lot of my friends came back from college and can’t find a job here,” said Feldman, who graduated from Wilbur Cross High School. She said she has heard that some haven’t even been able to get an interview at Yale.

“That’s crazy to me, because the university seems like it has so many resources,” she said, citing the university’s nearly $30 billion endowment. ​“I think about all the young, talented people who are leaving this city because they can’t find work.”

Vereen echoed this, mentioning her three children who decided to leave New Haven after college.

“I want my kids to come back to this city,” she said. ​“I want other black kids to see that they did something with themselves. I want them to be role models for other kids in this neighborhood.”

The woman eventually volunteered to canvas with the union, and said she’d consider putting up a sign.

“They need jobs yesterday,” she said.

The group mounted three lawn signs across two blocks Saturday morning. They estimated that the unions have put up between 600 and 700 signs in total across the city.

Feldman suggested that the signs, which don’t make specific mention of the jobs promise, were intended to spark an expansive discussion about Yale’s relationship with the city.

“We’re out here fighting for jobs, but it doesn’t end there,” she said. ​“There are so many things Yale could be doing.”

University spokeswoman Karen Peart said in an email that Yale supports programs like New Haven Promise, a full college scholarship for New Haven Public School students, and Pathways, a STEM summer program for high school students. She also cited over 130 startups created by Yale students and faculty that employ New Haven residents.

The canvassers said the university could do more.

“God forbid they pay their fair share of taxes,” Vereen said, alluding to tax exemptions afforded to Yale and other Connecticut universities since 1834. ​“This would be a different town. More homeownership. More people paying taxes. More people taking pride in their city.”

“[Yale] could change everything,” she said. ​“I know it changed everything for me.”