Lucy Gellman Photo
Quite a bit longer: Local 33 supporters blocking downtown streets before arrest last May.
Never mind.
After years of organizing, a partially won election, dozens of arrests and demonstrations, and a nationally watched hunger fast that drew leading politicians and celebrities like Melissa Etheridge to a protest encampment on Beinecke Plaza, UNITE HERE Local 33 quietly withdrew a petition for recognition as the union representing some of Yale’s graduate student teachers.
Local 33 — part of the larger union representing Yale’s blue-collar workers and office and research workers — formally notified the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of the decision to withdraw on Monday.
It was a signal that the movement to organize graduate student teachers on American campuses, which made progress under the eight years of the Obama Administration, is facing tougher sledding under the Trump Administration.
Last February the union, which has for 27 years sought to represent Yale’s graduate student teachers, succeeded in holding elections for representation in nine of 56 Yale departments. It won eight of those elections.Yale argued it did not have to recognize the union or negotiate with it, because the graduate school as a whole is one entity. Local 33 pressed ahead with the NLRB seeking recognition as eight separate mini-unions for the individuals departments that had voted for representation, arguing that they are distinct workplaces with distinct issues.
It was a precedent-setting argument that, had former President Barack Obama’s appointees still controlled the NLRB, UNITE HERE 33 might have won, based on how other decisions went during the past eight years.
But now Donald Trump is president, and he has been appointing business-friendly, anti-labor people to boards like the NLRB.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Robin (Canavan) Dawson at a Local 33 protest at last May’s commencement.
Local 33, like similar unions reconsidering strategy on other campuses, concluded it made sense to withdraw from the NLRB quest as a result , according to Co-President Robin Dawson, one of the union leaders who went on a hunger strike last year.
“President Trump’s NLRB has repeatedly demonstrated its hostility to workers’ rights,” she said in a statement released Monday night.
“We continue to call on the Yale administration to address graduate teacher concerns and stand with the labor movement and against the Trump Administration stripping us and thousands of other workers of our rights.”
“The University has steadfastly maintained that Local 33’s micro-unit strategy was inappropriate and that the departmental elections were undemocratic,” Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart stated in a release Monday night. “Yale remains deeply committed to graduate student education, and to providing its teaching fellows with the mentorship and training necessary to complete their degrees and go on to rewarding careers.”
So, if the fight looks difficult you stop fighting? Is that the example this union wants to set for others workers? If unions of the past employed the same logic who knows where labor would be right now. But, then again, these Yale Grad Unions are coming from a place of luxury that are unimaginable for most workers. So, I guess we can't be too surprised that they shied away from the fight.