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Yale Grad Students Launch Hunger Strike for Better Conditions

  • Members of the graduate students' union at Yale University demonstrate to pressure for labor negotiations.

    Members of the graduate students' union at Yale University demonstrate to pressure for labor negotiations. | Photo: Facebook / Local 33 - UNITE HERE

Published 26 April 2017
Opinion

As the graduate students teachers continue to organize and unionize, anti-union Yale is pushing back against their efforts.

Graduate student teachers at Yale University have launched a hunger strike for better conditions as the institution continues to crack down on the campus’ growing labor movement.

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Eight graduate students from the union Local 33-Unite Here, began their hunger strike protest — dubbed “Fast Against Slow” — Tuesday night, after a silent march that culminated in front of Yale President Peter Salovey’s house. The student teachers are attempting to force the university into negotiation with their union, which Yale has spent months denying the legitimacy of. They are demanding equal pay, comprehensive health care and institutional protection for women and other minorities in higher education.

"This is an indefinite fast, and we'll go until the university sits down with us," Charles Decker, one of the fasting students, told Mic. "And if one of us can't continue, we have colleagues that will take our places."

Two other women involved in the fast, Julia Powers and Robin Canavan, said female graduate teachers routinely face sexual harassment.

“Yale tried to assign a sexual predator to oversee my work and decide my future,” said Powers, reported the New Haven Register. “There is an ongoing crisis on campus that Yale sweeps under the rug.”

Canavan added that a Yale professor told her “not to worry about getting a job because I could use my boobs as leverage.”

As is typical of anti-union employers, Yale is running a campaign against the students and their union. Even though the National Labor Review Board granted Local 33 permission to hold union elections, the university is preventing the vote from being recognized as legitimate.

Organizers also allege that Yale is interfering in such a way because they want to wait until the Trump administration can place anti-labor appointees to the NLRB.

“They want Trump’s NLRB to crush our union,” said Aaron Greenberg, chairman of Local 33 and another one of the fasting graduate teachers.

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Despite this institutional pushback, mayors and lawmakers across the country have pledged their support for the Yale unionization efforts. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter in solidarity in February, while Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Maria Elena Durazo said the student’s efforts were akin to those of labor leader Cesar Chavez hunger-striking while he was the leader of the United Farm Workers in 1968 and again 20 years later.

“Yale wants you to wait,” Durazo said, as reported by the New Haven Register. “Those in power always want the rest of us to wait.”

For Decker, who is only one of 32 Black men in the entire graduate school at Yale, the union negotiations offer a semblance of hoping in raising awareness of Yale’s issue of lack of diversity.

"We'll keep going until the university sits down and fulfills their moral and legal duty to sit down with us," he told Mic.

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