Right wing talk show hosts and TV programs tend to blast Ivy League academia as bastions of liberal thought. Yale ranks right up there with left wing havens, as conservative talk shows have taken plenty of time to blast the New Haven, CT based university as a liberal landing point.
If you asked the students, they’d likely agree:
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By contrast, more than 98 percent of respondents said Yale is welcoming to students with liberal beliefs. And among students who described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal,” 85 percent said they are “comfortable” or “very comfortable” sharing their political views in campus discussions.
But in thirty years, one viewpoint has not managed to get through the Ivy League walls: unions. After decades of discussion, the University now finds itself faced with a Graduate Teaching Assistant fast while the administration seems to be hanging their hats on deep pockets and possible appointments by President Trump to put a stop to unionization attempts.
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UNITE HERE Local 33 is the newest chapter in a push for union representation among graduate students at Yale that started in the early 1990s. Its founding convention was in March 2016. In August, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that grad students at private universities have a right to collective bargaining. A week later, UNITE HERE Local 33 petitioned the NLRB for union elections in several departments. The board granted the request in January, and eight departments voted to unionize.
For its part, Yale has refused to recognize or negotiate with the union, and it is stalling the process by appealing the NLRB’s decisions. It has good reason to hope for more favorable rulings. Two of the board’s seats are vacant, and President Donald Trump’s appointees are all but certain to reshape it in a conservative direction.
Supposedly liberal Yale University? Not so liberal when it comes to worker protections and pay standards provided to graduate teaching assistants, workers who often make up a large portion of the academic backbone for any university.
As the American workforce changes, more and more Americans are working in jobs without union protections. Unions are already looking to the future and know that these workers also deserve protection for their efforts, as well as fair pay. The teaching assistants? They see it as well, with 8 departments voting to unionize.
The battle for fair pay for graduate students challenges a lot of assumptions about appropriate pay for appropriate work, and marketplace perceptions versus realities.
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Hungerford’s arguments about privilege will very likely ring false with graduate students who cannot afford child care for their families; with the 54 percent of graduate- and professional-school women who have been sexually harassed since arriving on campus, according to a 2015 campus survey; with the graduate-student teachers in their upper years whose pay was recently cut to $16,000 for doing the same work as their colleagues in lower years; with the grad-student teachers who are told they are apprentices for a minuscule and rapidly shrinking number of tenure-track positions. Regardless, the federal labor law that classified grad-student teachers as employees does not mark distinctions between workers who "really deserve" a union and those who do not.
The efforts to unionize Yale’s graduate student teaching assistants could have a major impact on how we treat all of our workers, far beyond New Haven.
So, take a bit of time tonight and sign their statement of support; not just to alert the university, but also to let students fasting for fair wages know there are people out here who support their cause.
Sign: Unite Here’s International Solidarity Statement