Partnership

Once upon a time there was a university named Yale with 19 billion dollars in the bank and a campaign to add another 3 billion almost halfway there. In 2003 this univeristy signed a contract with its workers and declared a new era of partnership. Kind of like back in 2002 when Levin hugged Bob Proto and then fired John Stepp and forced two strikes. Anyway, now Yale is subcontracting out sanitation jobs because of all that money they save by relying on folks with no control over their working conditions or wages. And because at only 19.3 billion in the bank, they're soooo hard up for cash right now. Turning Beinecke Library blue is expensive, i guess.

Green said the union will continue to stage protests over the coming weeks to raise awareness on campus. While only six members were present at Wednesday's protest, he said, the group made a conscious decision to focus on involving sanitation workers directly affected by the changes in the initial protests.

"We'll get more [union members] involved in the coming weeks," Green said. "We're collecting signatures from students, workers and faculty for a petition to [President Richard] Levin to restore garbage collection [to Local 35.]"

Green said they hoped to have the petition ready for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"We are going to march from Golf Street, where the workers punch in, to Levin's house and hand him the petition," he said.

Dan Bromel, one of the sanitation workers who attended the protest, said he worried that nothing prevented sanitation workers from seeing their jobs further reduced.

"We used to take care of all the trash," he said. "They subcontract it out, and now they got us doing recycling, but there's no guarantee they can't subcontract out recycling."

The group plans to set up a booth outside Woodbridge Hall in order to raise the visibility of the issue, Green said.