Commencement Day: Worker-Student Alliance Defies Yale Bosses

New Haven, CT, May 22 —It was Yale’s graduation day. Three thousand workers and students—multiracial, young and old, men and women—marched together through the streets of New Haven in support of Yale graduate student teachers who are waging a determined struggle for union recognition and their first contract. Thousands of Yale undergraduates and their parents witnessed a demonstration of class solidarity, as teamsters and steel workers, laborers and communication workers, K-12 teachers and professors, as well as hundreds of graduate students and undergraduates marched toward the commencement proceedings wearing bright orange t-shirts and chanting loudly. I was marching near a contingent of 100 casino and restaurant workers who came all the way from Atlantic City to support the Yale grad students.
Hunger Strike for Unionization
In the weeks leading up to the march, eight grad students conducted a hunger strike in front of the administration building, while another 23 were arrested in civil disobedience sit-ins that shut down busy intersections in New Haven. The union has made this fight a social justice campaign. It is not just for a contract that raises pay and benefits. They want a grievance mechanism for gender discrimination complaints and they have received support from many undergraduates, professors, campus workers and community members.
A local Black minister spoke at the ending rally and recounted the campaign his church led against racist unemployment, demanding that Yale hire 1,000 members of the community, which is more than half Black and Latino, and where a quarter of the population lives in poverty. He stressed how the graduate student union provided strong support for that anti-racist campaign and now he and members of the community are happily returning that solidarity. This is a lesson for faculty unions everywhere; support community struggle against racist conditions such as high unemployment and mass incarceration, and, in return, the community will support your struggle for better pay and benefits.
Yale sits on a $25 billion endowment fund, yet is refusing to negotiate with the grad students’ union, Local 33 of UNITE HERE. They prefer to wait until their billionaire buddy Donald Trump appoints new people to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), who will reverse previous NLRB decisions in favor of graduate assistant unionization.
At the commencement, when the wealthy trustees who run Yale marched by in their black robes, thousands of us sang “We Shall Overcome” to let them know we’ll continue the struggle. But that isn’t enough. The Yale Board of Directors is composed of owners of Wall Street firms and major corporations. They amassed their fortunes from the exploitation of workers in the U.S. and abroad. So it’s not surprising that they show contempt for workers at the university. Yale has trained generations of major figures in the U.S. ruling class, including the CEOs of companies like Boeing, the Blackstone Group, FedEx, and Time Warner, and major political figures (and war criminals) like the two President Bushes, Dick Cheney, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
As these graduate student-teachers fight for their union, they should expose the whole capitalist system that Yale and their millionaire and billionaire Directors represent. Help the Progressive Labor Party destroy this profit system based on class exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialist war, and build a communist movement that takes power away from the Yale trustees and the entire ruling class and puts it in the hands of working people, where it belongs.