Teaching assistants at Yale University will decide Monday whether to walk off the job if the university administration fails to grant them union recognition.

"For the past year, we've been trying to get the administration to deal with us. We've met with a brick wall," said Eve S. Weinbaum, a Yale graduate student and a leader of the union organization effort.

"Graduate students are quite frustrated and angry about not being listened to," she said.

Five years ago, humanities and social sciences teaching assistants at Yale organized the Graduate Employee and Student Organization (GESO) as a bargaining unit.

GESO's members include a majority of the roughly 1100 humanities and social science graduate students. GESO has formed an alliance with Yale's two official unions, Local 34--secretaries and other white collar workers--and Local 35--blue collar employees.

But Yale officials do not recognize GESO as a bargaining unit or as a member of the union federation.

"GESO is a student organization which thinks of itself as labor organization and would like to negotiate with the university," said Gary G. Fryer, Yale's director of public affairs. "But the university does not recognize it as a labor organization."

Representatives of the Yale federation of unions were unavailable for comment yesterday.

If approved, Monday's vote will issue an ultimatum to the university. If GESO is not granted a union election the week of March 31, members will not work the week of April 3, according to GESO members.

"For the week, teaching assistants will not teach their sections," said Theodore C. Liazos '89, a Yale graduate student in the history department. "Students are going to have to miss their classes."

Yale officials recognize the detrimental effect the April job action could have on undergraduate education.

"Obviously when people who have responsibility walk away from their responsibility, there's always some disruption associated with it," Fryer said. "We'll take whatever steps are necessary to resolve the matter."

But Fryer said there is no chance GESO's action could result in union status.

"[The vote] is entirely internal to GESO. My hope would be that they wouldn't [walk out] because it's not going to have the outcome they expect," Fryer said.

"The [question] is whether they have status as a bargaining entity. The university position is that they don't," he said.