After more than three decades of fighting for a union, graduate teachers and researchers at Yale University won a landslide victory in January. The difference this time? The administration didn’t oppose the effort.
More than two-thirds of those eligible graduate teachers and researchers voted, and 91% of them chose to affiliate with Local 33 of the national union Unite HERE, which has represented blue collar and clerical and technical workers at Yale for decades.
After the announcement on Jan. 9, Yale President Peter Salovey sent an email to the university community, explaining that Yale had honored the request of Local 33 to hold an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board and, based on the results, now promised to bargain in good faith to reach a contract.
Arita Acharya, an organizer with Local 33 and a graduate researcher in genetics, said she appreciated Salovey’s response.
“It was really heartening to receive that email, and to see that the university administration is actually recognizing graduate workers as workers,” Acharya said. “And I’m really looking forward to getting to the negotiating table and negotiating a great contract.”
The administration declined a request for a recorded interview.
Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley responded in an email that the university decided this time not to fight the unionization effort.
“In previous unionization efforts, the law was unsettled,” Cooley wrote. She said interpretation of the law varied among different labor boards, some saying those trying to unionize were employees, while others considered them students and therefore ineligible to unionize.
“Now that the law is settled and many of our peers have established graduate student unions, we are ready to do the work of negotiating a contract,” Cooley said.
Senior members of the administration sent emails to faculty emphasizing the importance of maintaining “a culture of respect and tolerance” in any discussions about the union and warning them against “threats, interrogation, promises and surveillance,” saying such conduct may be considered an unfair labor practice.
Gordon Lafer, the director of the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, was an organizer with one of Local 33’s predecessors, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, or GESO, at Yale in the 1990s.
He said he was grateful for all the generations of grad student workers who kept the campaign alive.
“I feel like the size of the victory — 91% — really shows the power of Yale’s intimidation and bullying all these years,” Lafer said, “because it’s been three decades of like, ‘oh, is there really a majority of people who support this or not,’ and it turns out that all of that was just a reflection of fear.”
For example, Lafer said when GESO carried out a grade strike the university put three of the leaders on trial for violating the order of a faculty member. They were called up before a university disciplinary board. Two were international students who, if convicted, would have lost their visas.
Graduate workers in Physical and Natural Sciences were harder to organize in past campaigns, partly because they got better pay and benefits than those in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and also because they were more dependent on the good will of their advisers, who were also their employers, and who most often fell in line with the administration, according to Lafer.
Acharya said the pandemic also had an impact on the recent organizing.
“It is really clear to all of us that we do work that is vital for the research and educational missions of this institution,” she said. “It was researchers in virology and immunology labs all around the globe, you know, that the world turned to to actually figure out this new disease and how we could treat it and how we could cure it. And those teams of researchers included graduate researchers all across the country.”
Local 33 organizers agree that unionizing at other top universities also played a role, not to mention the broader wave of union organizing sweeping the country.
“Our campaign is really part of a really big wave of graduate workers organizing across the U.S.,” said Paul Seltzer, a graduate teacher in history. “In the past few years, grad workers at Harvard and Columbia have settled really historic contracts, winning big pay increases, benefits and protections.”
Seltzer mentioned half a dozen other universities where his counterparts have successfully organized.
“It gives graduate workers a new context with which to see that actually having a union is beneficial,” he continued.
At Yale, the graduate workers were supported over the decades by the maintenance and dining hall workers of Local 35, who first organized back in the 1930s, and the clerical and technical employees, who won their union, Local 34, after a 10-week strike in the 1980s, with support from Local 35. The two unions together represent 4,500 workers and decades of labor solidarity. The grad workers constitute another 3,200 employees, according to Acharya.
“And now Local 33 is part of a coalition of over 8,000 university workers, which is the first campus-wide worker coalition of its kind,” Acharya said. “And I’m really proud to be part of a union that is driven by workers, and also really grateful to have the support of others on campus and the city.”
Lafer said he hopes Yale takes a lesson from the union’s victory.
“One of the things I hope Yale realizes is that after decades of talking about a union as if it would turn the world on its head, could realize that, ‘Oh yeah, it makes things a little fairer, it makes people better paid, it creates some due process,’” Lafer said, “but the university basically functions in the same way, and it’s not such a threat.”
No date has been set for the first bargaining session, but Local 33 members are starting to line up their priorities.