From the archives

That image is from the December, 1991 issue of The GESO Voice, a publication whose later iterations I became intimately familiar with during the 2001-2003 contract fight and the continuing recognition struggles that bookended it.  It depicts a march of Yale University graduate employees during a one-day strike on December 4, 1991.  (I think this was the first strike by Yale grad students since the 1972 Teaching Assistants Organization grade strike, though I remember reading about some solidarity work by folks during the '84 strike that probably also counts.)

I spent spring break looking through the archives of District 65, an important and powerful NYC union which was, among other things, the precursor to the local that GSOC is now in (it also made several attempts to organize Yale's C&Ts between the late 1960s and 1981, organized New York department store workers in the 1930s, and - and this is why I was looking through the collection - successfully organized Barnard and Columbia clerical and technical employees.)  While waiting for the relevant boxes to arrive, i decided to examine two boxes of material from Yale's TA Solidarity and the early days of its successor, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, both of which were donated to Tamiment by the labor historian Gunther Peck sometime in the last eighteen years.  In both collections I found some pretty amazing stuff, and my research is still continuing.  In the weeks ahead, I'll try to use this space more frequently to think about what I'm finding and hopefully have some good conversations with readers about what it all means.  For now, I need to put the finishing touches on my conference paper for Beneath the University.  I'm writing about the role of service work in the political economy and cultural imaginary of university capitalism.  I'm having fun, but I'm not sure my intervention's going to be a particularly useful or competent one.  I'll soon dfind out, I guess.  In the meantime. I'll leave you with this.

edit: should note that the second image, from a later GESO Voice is from the 1992 strike, which was a three-day general strike by graduate students, food service workers, maintenance, custodial, and physical plant workers, and clerical workers and technical workers.