Aliyya Swaby Photo
Hundreds of Yale grad students and union members marched to the university provost’s office to deliver a 200-foot-long petition demanding the right to negotiate on mental health benefits, racial and gender equity and funding security.
The Graduate Employees & Students Organization (GESO-UNITE HERE) organized the rally Tuesday afternoon to continue to press university administration to recognize them as a union on campus, just after graduate employees at nearby universities New York University and University of Connecticut settled contracts for unions this spring.
“We want to act like a union … We want what NYU got: a process for a free, neutral and fair election,” said GESO chair Aaron Greenberg, also the alder of Wooster Square.
Yale graduate employees turned out in orange and white to march a few blocks down Hillhouse Avenue from President Peter Salovey’s home toward Provost Ben Polak’s office. They cradled a long banner of more than 1,100 petition signatures in the middle of their ranks.
“We deserve a contract,” they chanted as they headed down the middle of the avenue.
Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy said in a statement: “Yale believes that its graduate students are students, not employees, and it would not be in the best interest of the students, the faculty, or higher education to change the teacher-student relationship to a manager-employee relationship.
“Yale provides its graduate students with levels of support — full tuition fellowships, stipends, and free health care and other benefits — that are among the most generous in the country, and graduate students have a respected voice in University affairs that affect them through the excellent advocacy of the Graduate Student Assembly and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate.”
Members of New Haven unions showed up to show their support. Karen Young, recording secretary of Yale’s UNITE HERE Local 35, said she joined the rally because GESO “deserves the contract.” She works in Yale’s mail service on Winchester Avenue. “They do the majority of the work anyway,” she said. “I’m coming out to support them.”
New Haven Rising organizers Reverend Scott Marks and Kenneth Reveiz also marched in solidarity with the Yale graduate employees.
Just as it’s outrageous that few New Haven residents are considered for jobs in their city, “it’s outrageous that GESO has to file these grievances or has to fight to be considered as a union,” Reveiz said.
Graduate employees shared with the crowd the ways they had been personally affected by the lack of a union and by the concerns in the petition.
Third-year math graduate student Tif Shen said he waited one and half months to hear back from Yale Health’s mental health providers after reaching out for help dealing with depression last fall. “I was feeling very lonely and abandoned back then,” he said.
When he finally was connected with a therapist, he had trouble making regular appointments, because his therapist was “overbooked and over-committed,” he said. Though Shen said he is “feeling much better now,” he called on the university to eliminate the cap on the number of sessions graduate students have with mental health professionals.
The presence of a union on campus would allow graduate students to “have a say over how mental health services will be provided to graduate students,” Shen said.
Claire Dickey and Adom Getachew (pictured) called on Yale to honor its past promise to diversify its teaching staff, in terms of race and gender. Getachew, a sixth-year political science graduate student, has seen many black female professors leave for other universities after not receiving tenure, leaving her with fewer options for career and project mentors.
Dickey, a first-year astronomy student, said she is surrounded by men and very few women in her field. “How can I believe I’m able to stay in a field I love if I don’t see examples of women doing just that here at Yale?” she said.
She said it is hard to talk with her male mentor about “microaggressions” she experiences from male peers for being a woman.
Getachew, Greenberg and GESO co-chair Robin Canavan delivered the rolled-up petition to someone in the provost’s office. “We want a union,” Greenberg said. “We will be back until that happens.”
I get that unions can be very helpful and important for protecting the interests and material wellbeing of the poor and vulnerable. Yale graduate students, however, are neither of those things. They're extremely privileged individuals who can pretty much go anywhere and do anything they'd like.