while i'm blogging about Yale stuff for no reason...

Compare this Yale Police Panegyric to Paige Austin's piece on the YUPD and racial profiling in the New Jounal last year, and see which one is more implausible. I think you know my answer. It's a shame that the Herald has lax enough editorial standards to print something this vapid and badly researched, and this is just about the most elitist, patronizing piece of screed since Kirchick meticulously detailed the quivering lips of union scabs. God forbid Yale workers should stand up to a boss that has treated them like dirt for sixty years, and against which everything they've won, they've won on a picket line. God forbid Bobby Proto should oppose retaliatory layoffs when the university's endowment jumps 20%. I mean, what a greedy union bureaucrat, proctecting workers' jobs. "Yale workers allow young minds..." - what a crock of shit! Yeah, Yale works because they do - so because you claim to acknowledge the importance of their work to letting you sit on your ass, that means you have the right to dictate what they should think about their elected leadership to them? Thank god for you! Have you ever talked with a dining hall worker about the strike? And finally,

Let me be clear, I don't plan on joining the Undergraduate

Organizing Committee anytime soon. Yale's workers should be treated well, but

the students who support striking workers at Yale are also making themselves

political pawns for the union leadership, specifically Local 35 President Bob

Proto and John Wilhelm, TC '67, leader of the national Hotel and Restaurant

Workers Union. I fully believe that these men hijacked the livelihoods of Yale's

workers and students to advance political ambitions.

I'm glad you think that Yale workers should be treated well. I think that Yale should negotiate with its workers and students as partners rather than as pawns or lessers, and the only way that has ever happened is when Yale's workers and the New Haven community took the kind of action you condemn as self-interested. (And before you make proclamations about whether or not Yale workers are mistreated, try talking to some. Better yet, try working in a dining hall or at durfees and trying to figure out why you haven;t recieved any of your last three paychecks, or why your supervisors are shouting racial epithets at you as you try to clean an elevator floor.) As a founding member of the undergraduate organizing committee and as a former staff member of the "Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union," i'll tell you flat out that none of us are or were hijacked, and to intimate otherwise is profoundly disrespectful. Why is it that when you insult working people, you're independent and rational, and when we criticize the university for arresting, intimidating, and firing its own employees for union activity, we're political pawns? Fuck you!



The workers and students i marched with on the picket lines during the two strikes of 2003 knew exactly why we were out there - to build new kinds of enriching relationships between eachother and the university that Rick Levin had spent the last three years trying to stop us from making, to win organizing rights for all workers at Yale, to desegregate Yale's job structure and force the university if necessary to start hiring Latinos and create training programs for unskilled workers which would give people who'd given yale their entire lives a chance to move up the ladder, to make it clear to Levin and the corporation that we would not tolerate a system in which Yale forced workers to retire into poverty. After the settlement that spetember, the workers i talked to were overjoyed. The atmosphere outside the center church on the green was almost carnivalesque after the ratification vote. You claim that workers must have learned by now that they have poor leadership. i think what they learned form the strike is that when they are strong and when they are together and when they strategize and combine militant organizing with research and broad, innovative, community organizing, they can beat a $12 billion dollar corporation. I know that's what i learned at Yale. And i won't ever let you or anyone else "hijack" that.