Campus Response

Yale students had a mixed response to the labor protests yesterday. While most said they sympathized with Locals 34 and 35, they also said they did not agree with GESO’s position.

First-year student Scott Peachman said he thought Yale’s President Levin should have been more willing to negotiate. “I believe that Levin should have talked to them more,” Peachman said.

But first-year Ershow said that although he supported the workers, he thought the graduate students had nothing to protest.

“I think we’re all sympathetic towards the dining workers,” Ershow said. “I think most people are sympathetic toward the people in Local 34 and 35 who make this place run on a day-to-day basis, but at the same time the grad students have one of the sweetest deals in the country.”

And at the Jackson rally, support for GESO was far from unanimous.

Protesters booed some mentions of GESO while enthusiastically cheering the mention of the other unions.

GESO Chair Anita Seth said yesterday that she believes graduate students have a fundamental right to unionize.

“Many [undergraduates] have the same conceptions that I did—that unions are for poor people, perhaps maybe for blue-collar people,” she said. “I see unions as a means of anyone asserting democratic control in their workplace and therefore important for anyone.”

According to Kate Reed, a first year history graduate student who is a member of GESO, the organization represents about 1,350 of Yale’s 2,400 graduate students. The University does not officially recognize GESO as a bargaining representative for graduate students, which Reed says is GESO’s main complaint.

“I have money,” she said. “It’s just the right to organize [I want].”

Second-year history graduate student Louisa Walker echoed Reed’s call for the university to allow GESO to negotiate.

“It’s basically an issue of respect,” Walker said. “We just want to sit at the table with them.”

Yale Professor of American Studies Michael Denning spent the day picketing in support of the workers. He said GESO should be legitimized.

“GESO may not be officially recognized, but it’s been here for ten years and it’s part of the community,” he said.