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URGENT UPDATE FROM YALE GESO: Yale 'Trials & TA Lockout'
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Date: Sat Jan 13 18:14:56 PST 1996 From: nagps@netcom.com To: nagps-official@nagps.varesearch.com Subject: URGENT UPDATE FROM YALE GESO: Yale 'Trials & TA Lockout'
January 13, 1996
Dear Friends:
Here's the latest on the Yale strike:
This past Wednesday, 138 people were arrested for blocking the street in front of the Yale Graduate School in protest over the disciplinary hearings going on against three leaders of the union here. There was a total of over 500 people at the demonstration, including workers from the other Yale unions and faculty and graduate students from other universities throughout the New York/New England region.
The "trials" took much longer than anyone expected. The first five hours were taken up with negotiations over whether or not our lawyer -- a Yale law professor -- would be allowed to address the Disciplinary Committee on procedural issues, and ended with the Committee ruling that he could not. So we had a lawyer present who was not allowed to say a word throughout the proceedings. The Committee would not allow a union steward to participate in the hearings, and refused a request to tape record the proceedings. When the person being charged asked to question the Dean of the Graduate School, she was required to write out a short list of questions, which the Committee read privately to the Dean, and then summarized his answers, with no chance for cross-examination. After a day and a half of hearings, the Committee found Diana Paton guilty of "disrupting University business" and "refusal to obey an order issued in the line of duty by a faculty member." She has had a letter of reprimand placed in her file, and is barred from teaching for the spring semester, i.e. she was fired from her spring semester job. The second case is scheduled to be heard on Monday, and the third either late this coming week or the beginning of the following week.
While we're obviously relieved that Ms. Paton was not expelled, to be banned from teaching is illegal under federal labor law. On Thursday we filed federal charges against the Yale adminsitration for violating the National Labor Relations Act, though since the courts have not yet ruled whether graduate teachers are covered under the Act, it may take years before this case is settled.
Meanwhile, Yale is going ahead with plans to lock out all strike participants. Last week, all teaching assistants got letters at home threatening that if they did not turn in grades by the start of the spring semester on Monday, January 15, they will be fired. Yale is on the way to becoming the first university to use academic "replacement workers" -- several departments are recruiting anti-union faculty and graduate students to take the jobs of fired TA's. Faculty members who are known "liberals" in their scholarly work are now cancelling lectures, eliminating discussion sections, or capping under- graduate enrollment in order to comply with the administration's lockout strategy. It's not clear whether Yale can really get by with so many TA's locked out, how much undergraduate education will be compromised, and how the incredible bitterness and tension in the Graduate School will play out.
On Sunday, Jan. 21, the contracts for Yale's other two unions expire. These unions, representing clerical workers, technicians, dining hall, custodial and maintenance workers, are facing their own problems, with Yale asking for major cuts in wages and benefits. GESO is officially allied with the other Yale unions, and there is a real possibility of a campus-wide strike during part of the coming semester.
There have been some TA's who have been intimidated by Yale's tactics and have handed in their grades. For the most part, however, the strike participants are holding strong, and we're hopeful that the administration will begin talks soon. Last week's lockout deadline for those TA's who teach their own courses came and went without a single person handing over their grades. The pressure from outside academics remains critical -- your letters to President Levin (richard.levin@yale.edu), Yale faculty (firstname.lastname@yale.edu) and the campus paper (ydn@minerva.cis.yale.edu), together with the censure motions at the academic conventions, are creating increasing pressure on the administration to negotiate. The administration's style in the past is always to say "no, no, never" right up util the last minute, so we take their current intransigence with a large grain of salt. Between the strikers on campus and supporters in the broader community, we're confident that we can bring Yale to the negotiating table.
With some people already locked out of jobs, and anticipating the possibility of a broader strike, we have begun a hardship fund to help pay the rent, utilities, etc. of people who are without jobs. If you are interested in contributing, checks can be made out to GESO, with a notation of "hardship fund", and sent to 425 College St., New Haven, CT, 06511. In the event of a campus-wide strike, the hardship fund will be made available to members of the other Yale unions in addition to the TAs.
Again -- thanks incredibly for your support.
Gordon Lafer, Research Director, Federation of University Employees at Yale
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