A Tale of Two Strikes

Baseball is coming back. Whoopdeedoo. It took the loss of the World Series to remind me how little I care for three hours of called strikes and beer commercials, interrupted by several minutes of multi-millionaires chasing after a ball.

But following the rules of the cosmic equilibrium, the end of the baseball strike has brought about a new kind of strike, featuring a new breed of spoiled talents. Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), which represents about 350 teaching assistants, took a stand for the proletariat everywhere and called on its members to not teach any classes this week.

Of course, the one major difference between this strike and the baseball strike is that no one cares--not the majority of the Yale students, and hardly any members of the Yale faculty. I wouldn't expect President Clinton to try and settle this one soon. And don't expect the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to end this strike either. They don't even recognize graduate students as workers.

Here we see the heart of the dispute. Yale students are striking because, like the NLRB, Yale refuses to recognize them as workers. And the legitimacy of the strike turns on the question of whether teaching assistants are workers or students. At first, as GESO argues, it would seem one could separate the two capacities. To the extent that they teach, graduate students should be able to exercise their right to collective bargaining like any other University employees.

While teaching assistants contribute to every undergraduate's education, GESO ignores the fact that teaching is an intrinsic part of their education as well as their financial aid. Unlike technical and clerical workers, graduate students are at Yale to earn a degree, not to make a living. When GESO spokesperson Eve Weinbaum argues that "at Yale you can't support yourself by teaching," she forgets that students are not at Yale for that purpose.

Yale students may teach to ease the burden of the cost of their education, but they receive financial aid from the government and the school because we subsidize future academics, not because their work as teachers is worth room, board, and tuition.

Graduate students are supported not by a salary, but by a stipend. They teach undergraduates as a part of their financial aid packages that forgive the thousands of dollars in tuition they would otherwise pay. This logic does not escape Yale University, even if GESO leaders don't grasp it. While students rallied to support clerical and technical workers' attempt to unionize in 1984, few students support GESO's efforts.

In fact, this strike may reflect Yale's troubled labor past, more than the legitimate claims of oppressed students. According to one Yale source, Yale's Local 34 will renegotiate its contract next year and hopes to use GESO to strengthen its position. For this reason, the union is bankrolling GESO's efforts to secure University recognition.

But in seeking recognition as paid employees, GESO degrades the idea of a university as a community of scholars. As Yale's recent refusal of the $20 million Bass grant shows, unlike most of America the university is not simply in the business of making money. And graduate students are not in the business of making money either. While some may dream of a comfortable tenured position in their future, they should be commended for ignoring the financial lures of law and Wall Street in order to pursue academic knowledge.

At the same time, we must fault GESO leaders for disrupting their commitment to academics in an attempt to take a few hundred dollars more from the university. GESO members must abandon the illusion that they are merely salaried laborers at their university.

In the end, the strike will not matter. Lacking support from the greater Yale community (including graduate students in the natural sciences), GESO will be unable to receive union recognition. The strike will merely be another black eye on a university that has had its share of recent embarrassments.

Then again, maybe there's something we at Harvard can like about this strike after all.

Steven A. Engel's column appears on alternate Wednesdays.