500 Rally For Jobs; Labor Peace Looms

As union contract negotiations intensified at Yale, hundreds of workers jammed City Hall’s atrium to demonstrate their strength — and held their fire at the university.

Could that mean labor peace is returning to New Haven’s largest employer?

Yale’s UNITE HERE unions organized the town-gown ​“unity rally for a future for good jobs for everyone” Wednesday evening. They originally planned an outdoor rally. When Mother Nature had other plans, organizers crammed at least 500 people inside the first floor of City Hall and along the second-floor balcony.

The rally took place as Yale and UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35 race to negotiate a new contract for some 3,600 clerical and technical workers and 1,200 blue-collar workers such as custodians and dining-hall employees. Their current contracts run out Jan. 20. (Yale’s 65-member police union has been working without a contract since June 30.)

Two main issues have divided Yale and Locals 34 and 35: job security, including a union quest to prevent 986 clinical jobs at Yale’s medical school from being converted into non-union Yale-New Haven Hospital jobs; and a Yale request for a two-tier health insurance plan with new employees starting out with lower benefits.

The two sides have squabbled publicly throughout the year in ways reminiscent of the bitter labor relations that led to seven strikes in a 34-year period ending in 2003.

But in interviews before the rally Wednesday, Yale Vice-President Eileen O’Connor, Local 34 President Laurie Kennington, and Local 35 President Bob Proto all reported the two sides had been making progress and bargained in good faith. They all expressed optimism about reaching a deal.

“We are hopeful,” O’Connor said. ​“We feel they have put forward some concrete proposals. We feel we have put forward some concrete proposals.”

“We’re trying to roll up our sleeves and get it done,” remarked Proto. ​“They are willing to do the hard work. We’ve overcome a difficult relationship. We’re looking to the future now.”

So instead of criticizing Yale in his remarks to the crowd, Proto (pictured) made the case for why the fate of Yale workers is linked to fate of workers throughout Greater New Haven.

He noted that one of every three workers in New Haven is employed by either Yale University or Yale-New Haven Hospital.

“So when we’re fighting” for job security or the right to organize new unions (such as the drive to represent Yale’s graduate-student employees), Proto said, ​“we’re fighting for the future of good jobs in this region.”

It was a classic UNITE HERE New Haven rally, full of chanting, colorful signs and music, as a keyboardist, bassist, and drummer who usually gig on Sundays at church on Dixwell Avenune filled City Hall to the rafters with the infectious beats from the Staple Singers’ ​“I’ll Take You There” and Michael Jackson’s ​“Billie Jean.” The rally also had choreographed, pithy, energetic speeches from a wide variety of labor and community supporters. (Unions that don’t have a close working relationship with UNITE HERE — city teachers, firefighters, and most municipal government bargaining units — did not have a presence.)

Speakers ranged in age from 13-year-old Lihame Arouna, who lives in the Hill and whose sister is active in the pro-union New Haven Rising activist group (“We want a future with good jobs for everyone!” she declared. ​“Thank you!”) …

… to activist Edie Fishman, 95, pictured at left with Etta Murphy and Yale retiree Pat Carta. Carta noted that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned for comparable jobs when she started working at Yale in 1979. Now, she said, women and men at New Haven’s largest employer earn comparable wages for comparable work. Carta was active in the original Local 34 organizing drive that won recognition in 1983 and set those changes in motion. ​“The president at that time was Ronald Reagan,” she noted. ​“And we won. We won big. Let’s keep up the fight.”

Local 35 member Eddie Streater (at right in photo), one of the faces in the crowd, knows whereof Carta spoke. Streater, who’s 67, is a painter at Yale’s physical plant. He earned $3 an hour when he began working at the university in 1969. Thanks to gains in subsequent union contracts, he now earns $78,000 a year.

Ruth Resnick’s family has lived that story for three generations. Back in 1970, when she worked at Sterling Memorial Library, Resnick joined an ultimately unsuccessful effort to unionize clerical and technical workers through a group called the Yale Non-Faculty Action Committee, one of several organizing efforts that set the stage for the ultimately successful campaign by the union now known as UNITE HERE (then known as the Hotel Emloyees and Restaurant Employees). Resnick watched her late father Sid, who worked in Yale’s law school library, play an active role in the successful Local 34 organizing drive a decade later. Her mom Arlene walked a Local 34 picket line when she worked at the medical school. Wednesday night Resnick attended the City Hall rally with her son Gabe Johnson (next to her in the above photo), who today is one of five Local 34 organizers at the School of Management. He’s keeping a family social justice tradition alive, Resnick said.