Local 34 Marches As Contracts Talks Hit Key Stretch

With a clock ticking down on negotiations on a new contract, hundreds of unionized Yale clerical and technical workers marched to the university president’s doorstep Wednesday evening.

The march followed a closed-door mass membership meeting in Battell Chapel of UNITE HERE Local 34, which represents clerical and technical workers at the university. The meeting focused on main union goals in these negotiations, which have included preserving jobs (rather than having them redefined as non-union positions); and preserving benefits. The union is opposing a Yale proposal for a two-tier system in which new employees get lower health care and pension benefits.

Fifteen members of Local 33, the newly formed UNITE HERE local for graduate student teachers looking to unionize, also updated the meeting on its hearings before the National Labor Relations Board. They expressed confidence that they’d receive a ruling approving petitions to form nine bargaining units; the crowd cheered them on.

After the meeting, Local 34 organized the march, complete glow sticks and bucket drums, to Woodbridge Hall, the university president’s office.

“We are not erasing 32 years of union history,” Local 34 President Laurie Kennington said to the crowd. ​“We’re not going to concede our most important benefits.”

Yale began negotiations with its unions, UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35, in March. Union leaders aim to secure a new contract for their members before the current one expires in January — maybe even by winter break, Local 34 Secretary/Treasurer Ken Suzuki said. In recent weeks, negotiations have upped in frequency and intensity, he added, in an effort to reach an agreement. (In 2009 and 2012, Yale and its unions wrapped up deals months before deadline.) New Haven has much at stake: Yale has a history of strikes that affect not just thousands of workers but local businesses and dominate other political decision-making in town.

Suzuki (pictured) said that the bulk of the negotiation time from March to September was spent on securing 1,000 jobs at stake in the university’s medical school. UNITE HERE has previously claimed that the university is moving unionized jobs at the med school to Yale New Haven Hospital, which is non-unionized.

“It’s important to us that new hires get to achieve the same wages and benefits that we fought for, and we’re holding firm to that principle,” Kennington said.