Why We Are on Strike: A Yale Graduate Student's Story

I am a sixth-year graduate student in early American history at Yale University, currently on strike with my union, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO). In Germany, my home country, market-oriented elite universities such as Yale and Harvard are commonly presented as a desirable alternative to our own overcrowded and under-funded public higher education system. Thus, when I came to Yale from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1999, I expected to spend most of my time in the beautiful reading room of Sterling Library, studying Euro-American relations of two centuries ago.

Little did I know that in addition I would be walking picket lines during three strikes, in the spring of 2003 (through blizzards and pouring rain), the fall of 2003 (among bewildered incoming students), and now again in the spring of 2005, as part of a national movement of academics. Along with many of my colleagues in the Yale History Department, I have come to conclude that the unionization of graduate students provides the only prospect of reversing the rapid decline in the academic job market and thus preserving the quality of undergraduate teaching and academic freedom.

Since graduate teachers at Yale began organizing in the early 1990s, we have won significant victories, from increases in stipends, teaching pay and benefits, to the establishment of teacher training programs and an Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity. Our current strike aims to safeguard these gains through union recognition, while also addressing remaining problems which restrict access to graduate school for parents, scholars of color, and those from non-elite backgrounds. Family healthcare and affordable childcare, improved family and medical leave policies, and a binding grievance procedure will go a long way toward making academic work a realistic option for a more diverse group of aspiring scholars. An additional demand of our strike is a change in the current teaching pay scale, which varies widely by department, and which penalizes experience by paying graduate teachers less as they advance into the final years of the program.

Graduate teachers and researchers at Yale began organizing long before receiving official federal sanction to do so. Even after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) extended employee protections to graduate students at private universities in 2000, Yale administrators repeatedly expressed their determination to fight unionization efforts all the way to the Supreme Court. GESO has therefore focused its efforts on building strong local alliances, with Yale’s two recognized unions, UNITE HERE Locals 34 & 35, with workers at the Yale-New Haven Hospital who are also seeking union recognition, and with members of the New Haven community who demand greater accountability from Yale as the city’s largest employer.

Since the Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided last summer to strip graduate teachers of their legal status as employees, GESO has expanded its focus beyond New Haven to build alliances with other academic workers around the country. The Supreme Court decision in the Yeshiva University case twenty-five years ago, which stripped faculty at private universities of the right to organize, was followed by a rapid increase in poorly-paid, part-time, temporary, and insecure positions. With that history in mind, the current generation of graduate students has no choice but to fight the Bush administration’s attempt to strike a similar blow to our unionization movement. We are beginning that fight with the current strikes at Yale and Columbia, the first ever coordinated job action in the Ivy League, which has drawn the support of already recognized academic unions across the country and the international labor movement.

My reasons for striking are connected to this larger national picture and grow out of my experience on the job market this year. Looking for an academic job for the first time, I was prepared for the paltry number of tenure-track jobs in my field. But I was surprised to find that because the pool of applicants was so large, universities were free to ratchet up the requirements for these job at will. A finished dissertation was no longer an asset in a market where some applicants had published books on their resume. A job talk was no longer good enough as a demonstration of scholarly expertise; increasingly, schools demanded more or less extensive demonstrations of teaching skills as part of on-campus interviews.

Related to these increasingly tough requirements is the proliferation of history post-docs, a trend which recently extended into my own department. This spring, the Yale administration imposed the creation of a teaching post-doc in my department, against the wishes of faculty and students. This abrogation of departmental self-governance is unacceptable to me and many of my colleagues. Moreover, we refuse to allow casual labor to get even more of a foothold in what is still one of the best history departments in the nation.

Taking a post-doc is supposed to give an up-and-coming scholar an edge in the crowded job market, by bestowing prestige, providing the time to polish a book manuscript, and by offering the “opportunity” to gain teaching experience. However, as more post-docs are created and involve teaching duties (make that “opportunities”), they are simply becoming another class of adjuncts doing the teaching and advising of undergraduates that used to be the responsibility of tenure-track faculty. As a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“Holding Pattern in the Humanities,” March 11, 2005) noted, the humanities seem to be following a path familiar to those in the life sciences, where post-docs have become a ubiquitous, and often terminal, part of young researchers’ careers in the academy.

Contrary to arguments that organizing will destroy the relationship between students and their mentors, this is a fight in which we and our mentors can unite to preserve the integrity of our department and of our profession. Unable to find a tenure-track position for next year, I have accepted a one-year post-doc position. As an individual, I have to make the best of the present situation. But as part of a movement of academics, I am fighting in the streets to make sure that future generations of historians will have better options.