Union workers at Yale University have been fighting for a contract for the last 7 months with little progress at the bargaining table.
The workers, who are members of UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35, are fighting for fair wages and benefits during this time of heightened inflation and a rising cost of living.
Yale is claiming that they are in dire straits and have reduced staff and non-tenure faculty. They’ve even revoked summer storage for low-income students and made cuts to graduate enrollment. If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Yale is on the verge of collapsing. Yale is hoping we don’t know any better. We do know better.
Yale is sitting on over $44 billion – making them the second wealthiest university in the nation.
We’ve seen this playbook before. When they claim their back is against the wall, they have made cuts to the workforce in the past, while their endowment continued to grow.
What are the workers at Yale asking for? Improvements to their health care that significantly cut down on wait times for appointments, critical job protection language that outlines how new technologies can affect our work, and a wage increase that reflect the immense impact their work and makes up for what they lost since the end of their last contract.
The workers at Yale are the unsung heroes of the university and they deserve a contract that reflects the value they add to the school every single day.