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The University and the Unions
The latest contracts have raised hopes that cooperation can replace a tradition of confrontation.
February 1993
by Jennifer Kaylin
Jennifer Kaylin covered the 1982–83 Local 34 organizing drive for the New Haven Register. Her most recent piece for this magazine was, “Probing the Presidency,” in the October issue.
Last February, when Yale ratified
contracts with its two largest labor unions, thus ending 14 weeks of
negotiations and averting another all-too-common strike, virtually everyone at
the University, from then-President Benno Schmidt on down, heaved a sigh of
relief.
The ailing economy and the reports
of Yale’s financial worries, coupled with the University’s history of
contentious labor relations, had made the stakes for these talks especially
high. And at the outset, many felt that the prospects of reaching an amicable
settlement seemed remote. But that’s exactly what happened.
“These agreements are extraordinarily
good ones,” declared Schmidt. “They are good ones for workers, the University,
and the New Haven community that is our home.” Peter Vallone, Yale’s director
of Human Resources and the University’s negotiator, noted that the two
four-year pacts (which marked the first time since 1968 that two consecutive
union contracts were settled without a major strike) would ensure “twelve years
of relative labor-management peace and twelve years of contracts without any
major strike occurring.”
The leaders of Locals 34 and 35 of the Federation of
University Employees, representing 2,500 clerical and technical employees and
roughly 1,000 dining hall and physical plant workers respectively, were
equally pleased. “This would be an excellent contract in good economic times,”
concluded Lucille Dickess, president of Local 34. “Given the current recession,
the high rate of unemployment, this contract is amazing.”
With both sides basking in the glow of the strike-free settlement, what happened next seemed puzzling. The
unions went out on strike anyway—in solidarity with the Graduate Employees and
Student Organization (GESO), a group of approximately 1,200 Yale teaching
assistants demanding union representation. Although the walkout lasted only
three days, it disrupted classes, angered members of the Yale community, and
received national media coverage. It also underscored how pervasive and complex
the issue of organized labor has become at Yale.
The oldest player is Local 35, which, in its 50 years at Yale has developed a reputation for incendiary
strikes. (In 1977, strikers rallied at the home of then-President Kingman Brewster
and threw as much garbage as they could find onto his lawn.) Then there is its
sister organization, Local 34, which since its founding in 1983 has become an
entrenched and potent campus presence. In addition to these, there are several
other smaller bargaining units.
Among them are the Yale Police
Benevolent Association, with a membership of 81, and a group of eleven teachers
at the Cedarhurst School, who belong to the American Federation of Teachers.
Both negotiate contracts with the University. Members of other bargaining units
are affiliated with Yale, although they don’t bargain with it. These include
Local 217, representing waiters at Mory’s; the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile
Workers at the Yale Co-op; and Local 1199, representing Yale–New Haven Hospital
employees.
The increasing impact of these
groups has created a growing concern at Yale that others will press for union
representation. Graduate students are in their second year of an effort to gain
University recognition. And most recently, the Association of Managerial and
Professional Employees, which draws its members from Yale’s 2,300 accountants, computer
programmers, librarians, research analysts, and business managers, has begun to
weigh the possibility of unionizing.
As much as Yale would like to cling
to the old notion that collegiality and shared respect for scholarship are
enough to keep things running smoothly, the reality is that universities, like
businesses, must confront an ever-widening array of labor issues. From wages
and health benefits to parental leave and sexual harassment policies, Yale is
being forced to abandon its traditionally paternalistic approach to the management
of its employees in favor of a decidedly more businesslike one.
The situation is hardly unique to
Yale. According to Richard Hurd, professor and director of labor studies at
Cornell University, while union membership is declining in manufacturing,
construction, and transportation, it is growing in the service sector, which
includes universities. He attributes this at least in part to the high
percentage of women working in service professions. “With the increased
emphasis on equality for women, and more women working out of economic
necessity, it creates a situation where there’s more likely to be interest in
unionization,” he says.
Hurd, who has been researching
nonfaculty unionization in higher education for the past seven years, says that
until 1970 there were almost no unions of clerical or technical employees on
college campuses in the United States. Today, he says, there are clerical and
technical bargaining units in about 20 percent of all four-year private
colleges and universities.
According to Hurd, Yale has played a
role in that increase. The success of its clerical and technical employees in
forming a union has, he says, inspired varying levels of organizing activity at
every school in the Ivy League, with notable success at Columbia and Harvard as
well as Vassar. “Harvard definitely learned from Yale’s organizing approach,”
he says. “They even adopted the slogan ‘You can’t eat prestige,’ that Yale
organizers used so effectively.” Campuses where clerical and technical workers
are not organized include Cornell, Brown, Princeton, Dartmouth, and the University
of Pennsylvania.
“What happened at Yale is what
happens virtually everywhere,” Hurd says. “At first the administration is
totally opposed. They can’t believe their ‘girls’ want to unionize. They
perceive themselves to be fair and can’t imagine that an ‘outside third party,’
as they like to characterize the union, could do as well as their own sensitive
managers.” Once the union is formed, Hurd says, the administration usually
finds it isn’t that difficult to deal with, “and a very comfortable working
relationship gets established.”
To a degree, that seems to be what’s
now happening at Yale. Peter Vallone of Human Resources says the University’s
aim is to be fair but firm. “With Benno’s arrival,” he says, “our position was
that we recognized the unions’ role here and we weren’t out to break them. We
went into the 1987 contract negotiations with that attitude, and with the
latest round of negotiations, we tried to build on that.”
Vallone says the last two rounds of
contract negotiations were settled without a strike in part because the
University was forthcoming about its finances. “For the first time we shared a
tremendous amount of data on health insurance, pensions, and payroll,” he says.
“We approached the negotiations with a willingness to be flexible within the
financial parameters we established at the outset.”
It was this willingness that also
enabled the University to negotiate what it considers a major concession on
health-care coverage. “The unions used to have one of the most lucrative
health-care packages imaginable, essentially free 100 percent medical coverage
for the employees and their families, to continue after retirement,” Vallone
says. “It was costing us a fortune.” Now, employees get 100 percent coverage if
they use the University’s health plan, but they pay premiums if they go
elsewhere. “It will save us $12 million over the term of the contract,” Vallone
says.
Pleased as he is with the medical
settlement, Vallone says salaries for members of Local 35 are still too high.
(A dining hall worker gets $3 more an hour than someone with a comparable job
at a New Haven hospital.) But he is comfortable with Local 34’s wage structure.
In general, Vallone dismisses complaints that union contracts drive up costs
while driving down efficiency. “That argument is used, I think, way too much,”
he says. “Yes, there are certain burdens an employer has to bear, but I think
the contract is often used as a scapegoat for management failings.”
A telling measure of the
relationship between union members and their employer is the number of
grievances that wend their way through the process and make it to arbitration.
On this score, Yale’s director of labor relations Donald Stevens says fewer
grievances are being filed at Yale than in the past, and about half of them are
being resolved at an earlier stage in the process. “There was a time when a
grievance inevitably went to an outside arbitrator,” he says, “but now we’re
finding both parties trying to make accommodations to reach a negotiated
settlement.” Stevens says that only ten grievances filed by Local 35 are
currently awaiting arbitration. “Five years ago we would have had at least 50.”
One reason for the drop-off, according
to Stevens, is that the University is training supervisors to anticipate
problems and, failing that, to resolve issues before they become formal grievances.
He also credits a “maturing of the relationship” between the University and the
unions. “It’s gotten much better,” he says. “Both sides have learned to live
with one another in a way that still supports the education and research
mission of the University.”
“The climate is changing,” concurs
Dickess, who, as one of the earliest supporters of the Local 34 organizing drive,
knows well how it felt when the University’s attitude toward the union was
downright frosty. “I think people are starting to realize that we’re not just a
bunch of greedy, deadwood malcontents,” she says. “They’ve had enough time to
see that a union can be a progressive, helpful, productive thing.”
As an example, Dickess cites an
effort spearheaded by Locals 34 and 35, and GESO last summer to open Yale’s
athletic facilities to city youngsters between the ages of 8 and 15. Union
workers staffed the gym while GESO members led workshops on writing, arts, and
the law. Yale provided transportation, lifeguards, and coaching.
Local 35 president Tom Gaudioso has
been doing battle with Yale for 21 years and is therefore more reticent to
declare a new era of labor peace. Yet even he admits to feeling “cautiously
optimistic” that relations between his union and the University have “turned a
corner.” His most tangible cause for optimism is a provision in the union
contract signed last winter that calls for the creation of a joint
labor-management committee to discuss employee and managerial productivity,
competitiveness, and efficiency.
At issue is whether the University
should be allowed to subcontract day-to-day work in order to get the job done
more efficiently at less cost. If this is done, it would mean less job security
for union members, so the committee idea was developed to see if greater
efficiency could be achieved while avoiding layoffs. “I know some of our members
aren’t doing a great job, I don’t deny that,” says Gaudioso. “But I also know
that this place is mismanaged. So now we’ve got a forum where we can
constructively criticize each other.”
Two decades ago, when Local 35
called a strike every time a contract expired, or even ten years ago, when
clerical and technical employees were organizing and Yale was fighting them
every step of the way, such measured expressions of shared responsibility would
have been impossible to imagine.
Labor relations at Yale were
probably at their lowest ebb in 1971, when a Local 35 strike culminated in a
bloody confrontation between New Haven police and strikers on Yale’s graduation
day. Six years later, a Local 35 walkout lasted more than three months.
Figuring that a sister union would give Local 35 more leverage when bargaining
with the University, the union actively supported the clerical and technical
employees’ 1982–1983 organizing effort. Along with financial and technical
assistance, the union lent them their business agent, John Wilhelm, who served
as Local 34’s chief organizer and later as its chief negotiator.
Wilhelm, a 1967 Yale College
graduate, was a forceful and charismatic leader who is credited with
engineering a victory where so many earlier organizing efforts had failed.
According to Dickess, “John has a gift for making every person he speaks to, no
matter how casually or seriously, feel as though that is the most important
thing he could possibly be doing at that moment. He has a real gift for
listening.”
Farnham Professor of History David
Montgomery specializes in labor history and has been a longtime observer and
supporter of union activity at Yale. He says that Wilhelm had a “real talent
for energizing people to take charge and create things for themselves.” The key
to Wilhelm’s success, according to Montgomery, was that he wasn’t autocratic.
“He got others in motion and let them do it.”
The other major protagonist in this
drama was then-President A. Bartlett Giamatti. According to many observers,
Giamatti was so intimately involved in what went on at Yale that he took the
Local 34 organizing drive as a personal affront. During the strike, he went so
far as to appear on the Phil Donahue show with Dickess and Wilhelm. Although
Giamatti, who died in 1989, remains a beloved figure in much of the Yale
community, the consensus is that he didn’t have the stomach to deal effectively
with the union effort. “He couldn’t resist getting personally involved, it’s
just the kind of man he was” says Dickess of Giamatti. “He would stop and have
arguments on the street with people who supported the union. Over time you
could even see a change in him physically, and that made me concerned.”
Montgomery says hubris also affected
Giamatti’s handling of the union effort. “He saw himself as an enlightened
administrator who could work things out with anyone,” Montgomery says, “so he
took the organizing drive as an insult to him personally. This made it
difficult for him to deal with the union once it was in place.”
Although Local 34 is now firmly
ensconced, Yale is still far from willing to accept any more unionizing without
a fight. Graduate students led a protest last year demanding higher pay for
those who teach, as well as better benefits and an increased voice in decisions
affecting them. That effort, though sharply opposed by the University,
continues. “We’re made to feel like a superfluous presence at Yale, yet we
carry out an essential mission of the University, which is to teach,” says GESO
Chairman Corey Robin, a graduate student in political science.
Yale, for its part, contends that
graduate students are “future scholars,” not employees, and therefore
ineligible for collective bargaining status. “I firmly believe unionization and
affiliation with an international labor union is not the appropriate solution
for students to redress their concerns, many of which are academic and not
issues of power,” says Provost Judith Rodin, who was until last year dean of
the Graduate School.
As a compromise, graduate school
students are now represented on the Yale Executive Committee, which gives
policy advice and recommendations to the Graduate School dean. “I think the
sense of frustration has diminished now that we have instituted formal avenues
for communication,” says Rodin. “The feeling is that there may not be the need
for a formal union.” GESO’s Robin confirms that the tension has eased: “We just
want some kind of process where graduate students are genuinely included, not
necessarily formal recognition by the National Labor Relations Board.”
In other concessions to GESO, Yale
administrators recently created a new job category for graduate students,
raising the pay of many teaching assistants by as much as 28 percent, and
instituted a teacher-training program for graduate students. They are also
reviewing, says Rodin, how best to “move students along toward a degree"
without insisting on the six-year deadline that formed part of the so-called
Kagan-Pollitt plan put forward in 1990 (YAM, Feb. 1991).
Another likely battleground down the
road could involve managerial and professional employees, who, besides top
administrators and faculty, are the only unorganized members of the University
staff. At least one recent effort to organize this group failed, and the
administration would like to keep things that way. “I would do everything in my
power to make sure that professional employees do not organize,” Vallone says.
To that end, he has instituted an advisory committee that meets once a month to
discuss their problems. Those employees now receive a newsletter, and the
results of a comprehensive two-year job and pay classification survey was
recently distributed to them.
“The old cliché is true: Sometimes a
union’s best friend is bad management,” Vallone says. He conceded that in the
past, clerical and technical employees at Yale were often treated capriciously
and unfairly by their managers. “Dignity is a big factor. For a long time there
were a lot of people here being treated like trash, and that’s very good fodder
for union organizing. Which is why we took steps with the professionals, to
make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
Depending on one’s point of view,
that statement is either defensive, or enlightened. At the very least, it
suggests that more than salaries have been affected by Yale’s encounter with
organized labor.  |
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