Yale Is Depriving Graduate Students of Their Rights

Yale está privando a estudiantes graduados de sus derechos

The Nation. Instigating Progress Daily/03-18-2016/Por Michelle Chen

Resumen: La universidad neoliberal pone énfasis en el poder corporativo en
lugar de la libre investigación, es por ello, que los miembros de la
Organización de empleados y estudiantes entregaron una petición a las
autoridades de la Universidad de Yale durante una protesta llevada a cabo
en el campus de New Haven, Connectitcut, para exigir la elección sindical,
con la que aspiran gozar de los beneficios: guarderías asequibles (las
guarderías presentes en el campus cobran honorarios que ascienden a dos
tercios del salario de un investigador graduado), tratamiento de igualdad
de género y diversidad racial en la contratación; la compensación salarial
equitativa, la financiación de becas para la investigación, garantía en los
pagos de salarios y mejores servicios de salud mental, desestabilización de
la fuerza laboral docente, compensación equitativa y financiación de becas,
servicios de salud mental. Beneficios que han venido siendo boicoteados por
las grandes corporaciones que manejan la Universidad, las cuales han
orientado a la educación superior hacia la reproducción de la fuerza
corporativa en vez de una verdadera investigación libre, amenazando a los
programas de postgrado por un lado con la mercantilización de la educación
superior y, por otro, las justas reivindicaciones de los empleados.

 

Yale’s epic labor battle between graduate student employees and the
administration has cycled through a generation of graduating classes and
many doctoral candidacies, and graduate student organizers have finally
officially named their union Local 33. A jubilant chartering convention last
week in New Haven certified that an overwhelming majority of the proposed
unit have signed cards signifying support for unionization. The move puts
an official seal (blessed by a number of state officials and the union
leadership) on the more than 1,000 signatures the group gathered for a
petition demanding a fair union election last year.

Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO)
chair Aaron Greenberg said that the formal naming of Local 33 shows it is ready to unionize with or without
an official nod from the administration, and hope to spur the debate
forward by taking the initiative, symbolic though it may be:

“We are not going to wait for Yale to give us an election to act like and
be the union that we are,” he tells *The Nation*. “And I think a lot of the
issues that we are fighting about, whether it’s access to childcare,
adequate mental healthcare, race and gender equity, security of pay. These
are issues that are not going to wait for us to have a union. These are
really pressing for our members. And we’re ready to fight on them.”

The chartering of the local doesn’t
seem to have changed the administration’s position. However, a spokesperson
for Yale says via email that it would respect the traditional secret ballot
process, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, and “officially
branding GESO as Local 33 is not perceived at Yale as anything new or
different, and it has no effect on the status of graduate students.”

As a legal matter, GESO’s institutional power and legal status remains
tenuous without any official recognition of the union from the university.
Under the precedent of “Brown II,” the NLRB has suppressed graduate labor organizing with a blanket denial of
collective bargaining rights at private higher education institutions. The
2004 ruling thus left union recognition at the employer’s discretion,
handing the mega-corporations that run Yale and other campuses wide
latitude to ignore the growing clamor for union representation among
graduate assistants and researchers.

But soon Yale (where the author was once an undergraduate) may have no
choice but to come to the bargaining table with Local 33, because, as were
ported last year, the graduate worker unions at Columbia University and the New School
have taken their demand for a union to the NLRB in Washington to secure their union rights and overturn
Brown. They’re backed by many labor unions and other graduate workers
—including those at public universities, where unionization is governed under separate
state labor laws, and the new UAW graduate workers union
at New York University.

 

Over the past decade, one could say the NLRB stranglehold has worked
exactly as the victors intended: On the neoliberal campus, working
conditions have grown more precarious, and higher education in general has oriented toward the reproduction of corporate power rather than genuine free inquiry. Educational borrowing has soared,
with typical 2014 debt loads for graduate-level students ballooning
to about $57,600, the bulk of it from graduate programs. As for paying off
that debt through an academic career, decent-paying, tenure-track positions
are perilously scarce, while the destabilization of the workforce shunts
former teaching assistants into an expanding underclass of underpaid
adjuncts. All these stressors are compounded by competitive and alienating campus
climates that often offer inadequate mental health and social supports.

University administrators argue that collective bargaining,
and the adversarial labor-management relationship, would undermine
conventional scholarly pedagogical relationships. Yale (though GESO is not
participating directly in the NLRB case) similarly contends that
graduates don’t need a union, since they are already compensated generously
and can address labor-related issues through administrative channels.

Graduate student labor advocates, however, say this romanticized logic
ignores real power relationships in the graduate workforce. In its recent
reply brief , the Columbia Graduate Workers union argues, “the supporters of Brown represent
the viewpoint of executives and administrators who…have seized upon
imagined threats to academic freedom and to mentoring relationships to deny
bargaining rights to their employees.” Meanwhile, the growing tendency for
under-resourced departments to exploit graduates, coupled with
inadequate labor protections, in turn constrain and distort their
relationship to the surrounding academic community. After all, it’s difficult to immerse
yourself in the inspired practice of intellectual apprenticeship when
working a night-shift restaurant job, teaching undergraduate courses on an
erratic schedule, and researching your thesis, while living off food stamps under
a life time of debt. Yale’s GESO has presented a multipronged agenda
focused on both academic and labor
issues. While demanding more equitable compensation and secure fellowship funding,
graduates have also criticized gaps in mental health services, which they
say are fraught with “long wait times and inadequate options for treatment”
for the estimated half of graduate students who seek help. They’re also
calling for affordable childcare, noting that “current on-campus daycares
charge fees that amount to two-thirds of a graduate researcher’s pay.” GESO
is also campaigning around issues of gender and racial diversity in hiring.

A quarter-century after Yale graduate students
kick-started the incipient labor group, TA Solidarity, campus organizing has blossomed in many forms across
campuses nationwide, including unionization drives for non-tenure-track
faculty (who currently make up the majority of the academic workforce) at public and
private institutions, from large state schools to underfunded historically
black colleges. Undergraduates are rallying with the Fight for 15 for
campus workers, both students and locals. And with national campaigns like the SEIU-backed
Faculty Forward, an emergent coalition of faculty, students and staff are
sparking critical conversations on how academic labor fits in the “new
economy,” and how to resist the corporatization of higher education, in theory—by protecting their
right to free inquiry—and in practice—by ensuring their rights at work are
respected.

So the graduate workers now going before the NLRB are inking one footnote
in a new chapter of educational activism—not just disrupting the ivory
tower, but reclaiming their campus.

Fuente de la noticia e imagen:
www.thenation.com/article/yale-is-depriving-graduate-students-of-their-rights/