nothin Why I’m Fasting | New Haven Independent

Why I’m Fasting

Aaron Greenberg.

Eight members of UNITE HERE Local 33, the new union representing some graduate student teachers at Yale, announced Tuesday that they have launched a hunger strike to try to convince the university to negotiate a first contract. One of the eight, union Chair Aaron Greenberg (who’s also a Wooster Square alder), offers his reasons in the following article. Click here and here for background on both sides of the dispute.

There comes a moment in the life of a struggle when the participants realize they must take a risk. They must risk ridicule, incomprehension, and anger. They must risk, at some level, themselves: to achieve their goals, they have to abandon their ordinary routines, to violate expectations about what is normal, to call the question so that it must finally be resolved.

A movement that seeks not just to make a point, but to win a true change, always comes up against this requirement. Then you either abandon your ideals or you put yourself on the line. This is the moment Martin Luther King, Jr. described when he wrote that he was not afraid of the word tension.’” King explained that his campaign sought to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

This is what we did yesterday in Local 33 when we began our fast. We have explored every formal means of resolving our dispute with the university. We asked Yale to agree voluntarily to fair conditions for an election. They refused. We filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board; Yale not only opposed them, but opposed our very right to file petitions. When the Board granted us elections, Yale tried to have them canceled. When we won, Yale generated more legal disputes. The university now wants to stall us to death, to have us wait until a Trump administration undoes our progress along with that of millions of other working people. We will not wait.

While we have gone down every avenue, the university has maintained one position. It’s the position President Richard Levin took in the 1990s when he said that he would rather shut Yale down than negotiate with us. After NYU recognized its union, an administrator at that institution marveled in 2003 that Yale’s leaders, in contrast, seem willing to burn down their campus over this issue.”

So let’s not have any mistakes about what Yale means when they say they respect the process” of the law. The university seeks to use the Trump presidency to disenfranchise us. It’s the dynamic Dr. King described when he wrote, “‘Wait’ has almost always meant Never.’” We know our movement is not the Civil Rights Movement, but the tactics of the powerful do not change.

Still, we recognize this move. We recognize it from being told again and again that things will improve soon if we just wait a little longer. Every graduate student has been told that the job market is finally picking up, just hang on. We’ve all heard Yale say that the administration is finally going to take action to diversify the campus — just give them a couple more years. After each new sexual-harassment scandal, we learn that Yale has known about the situation for years but didn’t want to act too rashly. When they cut our pay in 2015, it was called the aftereffect of the 2008 crash — just wait for the endowment to recover fully.

We’ve waited and waited and waited. We’ve waited while our ambitions go up in smoke, while our friends are humiliated and pushed out of the university, while our bank accounts are drained, our debts accumulate, our grievances are ignored. We’ve watched our whole generation of scholars lose faith, retreat, or work themselves into the ground. We have all lost colleagues to depression, harassment, discrimination, and economic hardship.

It’s enough. We’re taking it onto our own hands. For every further day that Yale wants us to wait, administrators are going to have to watch as members of their own community refuse food.

We understand that we will be questioned for this. We understand that we’ll face incomprehension, mockery, and anger. That’s fine. It’s part of any process of change — there are always those who believe in the goal but not enough to support the measures necessary to win it.

What we also understand is that universities — Yale, and the rest of academia — cannot go on this way. The election of Donald Trump has brought a long, slow crisis of the university to a head, and Yale must now make an active decision about whether it wants to live in Trump’s world or ours.

We know it isn’t in the character of the institution to make the right choice on its own. But we also know that a moment like this is when new things happen, when hope emerges out of crisis. We’re proud to be the ones taking the risk this process requires. We hope you’ll come talk to us as we fast and hear why each of us, individually, has decided to go down this path.

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