Yale Strike Over (fwd)

[Chegitz Guevara <mluziett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marc, "the Chegitz," Luzietti
personal homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett
political homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett/chegitz.html

"I just saved your fucking life Mom," YT said, "the least you could is to
offer me an Oreo."

Neal Stephenson's, "Snow Crash."

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Facing the loss of teaching jobs for the semester that
began Monday, graduate students at Yale University who had withheld grades
from classes they taught last fall gave in and ended their grade strike.

The students said they had not expected that Yale would carry through on its
threat to deny them teaching jobs, which many depend on for living expenses.
The grade strike was called to pressure Yale to recognize a union for
graduate teaching assistants.

But Yale had responded to the strike - the graduate students' most dramatic
action in their five-year campaign for a union - with a flat refusal to
negotiate, disciplinary hearings against three leaders and a firm pledge to
strip strikers of teaching assignments. And of more than 400 teaching
assistants in the humanities and social sciences, only 83 had taken part, the
administration said.

``We were met by a level of reprisals that nobody expected,'' said Gordon
Lafer, research director for the graduate group, ``and we thought it was
irresponsible to put all of our membership in the position of losing all of
their income for the spring semester. For quite a lot of people that would
have meant leaving New Haven.''

As classes resumed Monday, Yale's final deadline for the teaching assistants
to turn in their grades, the university's position had not changed, said a
spokesman, Thomas Conroy. Yale would never accept collective bargaining with
the graduate students. ``They are students, not employees,'' he said.

And as some graduate students turned in their grades late, they learned that
they had, in fact, lost teaching assignments, and that their departments were
not guaranteeing to find them new ones.

``It's not going to be resolved today,'' Conroy said of the semester's
teaching assignments.

Graduate students, who teach nearly 10 percent of the undergraduate courses
at Yale College and serve as section leaders in large lecture courses, have
campaigned for Yale to recognize the Graduate Employees and Students
Organization as their collective bargaining unit.

The organization contends that Yale, like many universities under financial
pressure, is using teaching assistants and part-time instructors in place of
more expensive full-time faculty, and that as long as Yale is relying on them
for teaching it should negotiate with them over pay and benefits.

While Yale waives tuition for nearly all of its graduate students and says
that its $4,900-a-semester stipends for teaching are a very small part of its
financial aid to them, for many students the stipends are their entire
income.

To cover their living expenses, they say, they must either take second jobs,
at the expense of their doctoral research, or add to their debt.

Feeding their anxiety is a depressed job market, as universities replace
full-time faculty jobs with part-time instructors. The job market is worst
for Ph.D.'s in the humanities and social sciences, the two divisions that the
graduate organization is seeking to represent.


Given those economic circumstances, students decided in a close vote Sunday
night to end the grade strike and save their teaching jobs, said Lafer, who
also serves as research director for Locals 34 and 35 of the Federation of
University Employees, which represents Yale's blue-collar and clerical
workers.

He said the graduate students intend to honor picket lines of those locals if
they strike when their contracts expire in two weeks. Local 35, the union for
dining-hall and maintenance workers, is resisting a proposal from Yale that
would guarantee current employees their jobs and salaries for four years but
establish a lower pay scale for new hires.

The union locals have pressed Yale to recognize the graduate student union,
but because the National Labor Relations Board does not recognize graduate
students as employees, the unions cannot strike over that issue as Local 35
did in the 1980's to win recognition for the clerical union.

Graduate students said Monday that they might stage job actions this spring
in support of their union. They have also filed an unfair-labor-practice
charge with the labor relations board that could bring the board to
re-examine the issue of graduate students for the first time since the early
1970s.

But administrators said they hoped the students could shift from the issue of
collective bargaining to the issues directly concerning them.

``I very much hope that we can now get down to the business of reconsidering
the many issues of graduate education and building a more fruitful structure
of dialogue,'' the dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead said.

``I'm glad for the sake of our undergraduates that we've been able to restore
the usual educational process,'' he said. ``And I'm glad for the many
graduate students who I knew to be in agony over the decision to withhold
grades.''

Many undergraduates said Monday that they were relieved that the grade strike
had passed and were critical of the graduate group for calling it. In a
survey of undergraduates conducted by The Yale Daily News last year, more
than 60 percent said they opposed recognizing a union for teaching
assistants.

``The administration should have been more sensitive to their requests, but
there's no way they should ever have withheld grades,'' said Merritt Lear, a
junior and history major.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 07:29:33 -0800
From: Nathan Newman <newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Multiple recipients of list LABNEWS <LABNEWS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Yale Strike Over

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 1996 09:49:15 -0800 (PST)
From: Bryan Hannegan <hannegan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: NAGPS Pacific Region <nagps-pacific@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Yale Strike Over




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