Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, and the 1971 Yale Strike

Excerpted from Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Beneath the University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City.  unpublished phd dissertation, New York University 2015.  pp. 424-425

Yale Law School students Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were both members, alongside future Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal and Bill Clinton’s eventual Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor Robert Reich, of the Yale Law School Students Committee for Local 35, and signatories, during the week before the strike, to a statement asserting “WE BELIEVE THE UNION DESERVES THE SUPPORT OF YALE STUDENTS AND FACULTY.”[1]  Bill Clinton was even, John Wilhelm would note decades later in his eulogy for Vincent Sirabella, the Voter Registration Chairman of the Sirabella for Mayor Campaign.”  And yet, on her first date with classmate Clinton, Rodham would later recall:

We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were closed.  As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery's courtyard.  Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action.  We had the entire museum to ourselves.  We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art.  I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas.  We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Drape Seated Woman While we talked until dark.^[2]

The relationship between Rodham and Clinton, two instrumental figures in the decoupling of the Democratic Party from the priorities of the mainstream labor movement, thus began with the crossing of a picket line.  [3]  When Rodham and Clinton picked up the garbage strewn about the art gallery courtyard, (if, indeed, they ever did so,) they were doing exactly what everyone from Vincent Sirabella to the Black Student Alliance at Yale had asked students not to do – they were performing –or at the very least offering to perform -- the work that members of Local 35’s Grounds Maintenance division, had refused.  Rodham and Clinton were offering themselves as replacement labor, blunting, if only temporarily, the effects of the strike on the university.  The two law students then bartered their litter pickup, which was, in essence, scab labor, (or maybe just the promise thereof) into access to a struck buildings.  The art gallery and other nonessential buildings were closed because the university did not have enough managers to keep them open during the strike.  They were closed because the people who usually cleaned and repaired them, whose labor helped make the university’s display of art possible, had been forced to absent themselves by the necessity which fueled the ongoing strike.  For Rodham and Clinton, the workers concerns were at best secondary to the romance of the empty museum, the sophistication and transgressive pleasure offered not only by the modernist art, but also by the act of violating the strike.  Hillary Rodham Clinton offers this anecdote in her 2003 memoir Living History not in her discussion of how her time in New Haven affected her understanding of urban politics and life, but rather in a distinct chapter devoted entirely to the origins of her relationship with the “Viking from Arkansas.”  The “labor dispute,” not even named here as a strike, is not only abstracted from the very spaces the future Clintons inhabit in this narrative, it is made incidental to them, an obstacle which has to be sidestepped in order for the art to be viewed and the date to acquire its romantic ambiance.

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[1] Law School Students Committee for Local 35, “Could YOU Raise a Family on $88 a Week?”, leaflet, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives RU 86 YRG 41 accn1971-A-004 Box 4 Folder 1.  April, 1971.

^[2] Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History.  New York: Scribner: 2003.  53.  I thank Dan Gilbert for alerting me to this incident.

[3] The campaign, notes Wilhelm, was “not a high point for Vinnie.  It persuaded him that the careers of aggressive labor leaders and politicians were not compatible.”  John W. Wilhelm, “Eulogy for Vincent Sirabella,” 1995.   Reprinted in Frank R. Annunziato et al, Greater New Haven Labor History Association, 1995 Labor History Almanac.  1995. recovered by Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the webpage of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association https://web.archive.org/web/20070313192745/http://www.laborhistory.org/almanac_dedic.html accessed 1/30/2015 

I wrote a bunch of tweets about the the ongoing occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge visitor's center that went semi-viral.

That turned into an 1100-word thinkpiece about settler colonialism, nature preservation, ranching, and primitive accumulation.  Happy new year

10 years

Today is the 10th anniversary of the 2005-2006 GSOC strike's first day. That strike is still the longest in the history of the north american academic labor movement (except for the 1999 student strike at UNAM.)  As any perusal of this blog suggests, the strike was a big part of my life for the better part of seven months.  I joined GSOC just over two months before the strike began, organized in the buildup to it, walked the picket line almost every day, organized throughout the strike, and kept organizing for years after it ended,  In the years after the strike ended, the organizing climate for graduate employees at private universities was a difficult one.  University administrations and the labor movement both rightly saw the NYU strike as a fulcrum.  Ten years ago, John Sexton said that GSOC was a "virus", that it could either die a quick death or a slow death.  Today there is a union contract at NYU.  Organizing drives are once again underway at Cornell and Columbia, with new campaigns at Harvard and the New School, alongside new unions or organizing campaigns at the University of Connecticut and the University of Missouri. A quarter-century into its own struggle, GESO is revitalized and holding enormous and energetic demonstrations.

While in many ways the strike was a defeat for the union, it was a testament to the tenacity and dedication of GSOC's membership and its organizers that the union emerged from the strike battered but also infused with new understandings of what it meant to organize and how to do it. The tragedy of the strike was the failure of solidarity between union members, but the lessons of the strike were altogether different, less about the shamelessness of faculty unionbusting - things the previous decade and a half had long since made clear - than about how to build power, how to talk to each other, how to fight. The failure of the years after the strike was the failure of the international union to sustain organizing which took into account the lessons we learned during the strike, a failure I could get into here in great detail but won't, both because I think those lessons were never entirely forgotten, at least by members, and because I still think that the experience of the strike, and the many sacrifices that strikers made (and I don't include myself in this, because I was on fellowship, and because the worst things that happened to me during the strike were getting yelled out of a bar by another first year in my department and having some people in my department who had returned to work write mean anonymous comments on this blog) played an important, if indirect role in the making the present moment possible. So I think it's good to think, at this juncture, with everything else that is happening today in Columbia, Missouri, in New Haven, in Madison, everywhere else, about what the strike got right and what we got wrong and what that experience might mean for the struggles which are now taking place at NYU and everywhere else.

Edit:  I wrote and edited and posted this several hours before Tim Wolfe announced his resignation.  Five years ago I wrote this post on the meaning of november ninth and november tenth in the history of university labor insurgencies.  It's amazing that this victory by the students at Mizzou falls on the same date that our strike began.  I can only hope that the next few months build on these insurgencies to create new anniversaries for us to celebrate in the years ahead.

2nd edit.  Also, I forgot to mention U Chicago's GSU, who are amazing.  Well, I didn't so much forget as intentionally steer clear of mentioning them because I'm out of the loop and wasn't sure what the status of their campaign is.  Thankfully, they're still going strong, and certainly deserve a great deal of credit for helping the movement to organize grad employees at private universities survive and grow over the last eight (?) years.

I posted this on Facebook this morning.  

"Nine years ago today, GSOC began the longest strike in the history of the US academic labor movement. For seven months, NYU TAs refused to work until union recognition was restored. Nearly two dozen of us were fired and blacklisted, and several never worked at NYU again. The strike taught a lot of us important lessons about the labor movement and the political economy of academic capitalism. It was generative and exhilarating and really difficult, and we went back to work in September 2006 without a contract. Today GSOC is negotiating a second contract with the NYU administration, which is, in itself, a testament to the sacrifices and determination of everyone who walked the picket line, told their faculty to fuck off or get their shit together, and spent the last three months of the strike organizing those who'd returned to work, keeping the union alive. Besides the determination of NYU Grad employees, the strike was a testament to solidarity of the broader contingent academic labor movement. Unions from as far off as Illinois sent organizers to us for weeks at a time. GESO sent three of its best full time lead organizers for as long as a year and a half, as well as a full time researcher and another part-time lead. (Two of GSOC's best organizers returned the favor by moving to New Haven and organizing for Unite Here.) The strike was exhausting and hard, and not being on strike and returning to Sextonian dystopian normalcy the year after that was even harder, but I am still in awe of the bravery and determination of all the people who kept the union alive that year and fought so hard against such a bunch of intractable capitalist shit-asses. Thanks guys."

Yesterday, I wrote about this photograph and the incident which produced it. The first time I wrote about this incident, ten years ago, I was relying on microfilm and the photos were too dark to see anything. Since then, this newspaper has been digitized, so we can all see the look of utter agony and dismay on the face of the wife of the President of the university after students supporting a service worker strike stole/expropriated a bunch of food from a scab-operated dining hall and then dumped it on the front lawn of the president's mansion. There’s something deeply sexist about the way Mrs. Brewster is represented in the photograph, as an object of simultaneous scorn and pity, as a symbol of the putative wrongness (or radicalism) of the students’ act, in the way she is only knowable here through her husband’s name, and in the invisibility of the male administrators who were also trying to pick up the garbage. But the photograph, and Mrs. Brewster’s dismay, also mark the dislocation, the profound disruption of the social order, which accompanies the moment when one has to do that work which others usually perform because those others refuse to do it any longer. In this sense, the photo of Mrs. Brewster thus suggests the reversals and utopic imaginaries which the strike had already enacted and made possible, even as it subjected the workers who waged it to insecurity and want.

Yale Break was a feminist newspaper written mostly by clerical and technical workers during the YNFAC organizing campaign.  (1969-1972).  From the chapter I'm writing:

The logo atop the first page of each issue is a clerical worker in a matching prison-striped Yale cap and miniskirt. A comically large IBM typewriter is shackled to her leg just above her high-heeled left foot. In one hand, she carries a stack of books, and in the other, a tray of hot coffee mugs. On her face, she wears glasses, and, like the flight attendants Arlie Russell Hochschild describes in her classic ethnography of emotional labor, The Managed Heart, a wide, cartoonish, haunting smile, part of the job as much as the typewriter or coffee

Yale Non-faculty Action Committee Newsletter, Vol. I, No. 1, June 20, 1969