Forecast Stormy for Graduation Day at Yale

During an ordinary year, in the hallowed moment of joy and solemnity that is a Yale commencement, the ritual begins with a grand procession. Students wend their way around the streets and greens before converging behind the university’s president and trustees, finally entering the grassy quadrangle of historic Old Campus through the Phelps Gate.

There, surrounded by the stone walls of 19th century Gothic revival and Romanesque buildings, with parents and grandparents proudly looking on, this student elite arrives at the crowning moment of their young lives. The traditional formalities are serenely recited by the college deans, an occasional benediction is uttered in Latin.

But this has not been an ordinary year, and the May 27 commencement is unlikely to be an ordinary ceremony. For four months, Yale has been at war with its union workers, fighting over an issue deemed crucial to the entire labor movement: the subcontracting of jobs to low-wage employers. And now, the pugnacious, new leaders of the AFL-CIO have declared the 295-year-old university to be a corporate outlaw.

The labor federation has sent out its own graduation invitations to union members within a three-hour driving radius. They are to toot whistles and shake noisemakers, filling the commencement air with the wrath of the people.

Instead of class picnics there will be class struggle. The union not only has a city permit to rally on the New Haven Green, just across from the commencement site, it will be allowed to march around the gated portals of Old Campus. With the union hoping for 10,000 protesters--and Yale expecting 13,000 students and their guests--university officials fear human gridlock and volatile encounters.

“It’ll take an hour to get all those [union] people around the block, and that’s if they want to move along. What if they don’t?” asked Gary Fryer, a Yale spokesman. “Our visitors are going to have to cross paths with electrical workers from New York and mine workers from West Virginia.”

Fryer pronounced the words “mine workers” the way someone else might say “Hells Angels.” But he is far from alone in his umbrage. Most of Yale is aghast. The student newspaper, which largely supported the union during two recent strikes, calls the graduation day protest “beyond the pale.”

Even April Smith, a senior once pleased to be arrested in a pro-union sit-in, feels a conflict. “Graduation is such a big day,” she said. “You want to be respectful. My grandparents are coming up from North Carolina.”

The union rank-and-file work in Yale’s offices, libraries, dormitories and dining halls. They type the letters and serve the food and clean the toilets. While sympathetic to the students, they feel justified in a display of gall.

Shirley Gaddy, who works in the finance department, said, “When we went on strike, our bosses did our jobs and told us: This is war. So my feeling is, there are casualties in any war, and the students are casualties in a war declared by Yale.

“We’ve offered binding arbitration and they’ve said no. Now we’re entitled to protest. Isn’t that something Yale teaches in the classroom?”

*

The new chieftains of the AFL-CIO, elected last October, have proclaimed a return to old-time militancy, trying to pump some juice into a labor movement sorry with anemia. They intend to take on corporate power, whether by blocking bridges or thumbing their noses. And they are looking for big targets.

Yale, that great incubator of the American establishment, is a high-profile choice. Presidents George Bush and William Howard Taft graduated from here, as did seven current U.S. senators, 17 congressmen and four governors. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham studied torts and fell in love at the law school.

But there is a reason other than limelight to take on Yale, and that is the nationwide matter of subcontracting. For years, one employer after another has farmed out union jobs to outside suppliers that pay workers lower wages and few, if any, benefits.

Yale wants a contract with unlimited subcontracting rights--and it makes this practical case: Money surely will be saved, funds that could be spent on research or much-needed building repairs or on controlling the undergraduate tuition and room and board, already up to $28,880 a year.

But the AFL-CIO looks at the economics from a different angle, arguing that what is good for Yale and other employers is not so good for America in general. Not only are income gaps widening between the rich and poor, working-class people increasingly cannot afford a middle-class life.

There is a case to be made for this view as well. In the mid-1970s, when unions still represented one in three workers--double today’s rate--Labor had more leverage to protect its people. Union wages pushed up nonunion wages.

But in a downsized, deregulated, de-unionized, subcontracted economy, the strict dynamics of labor markets have been freer to operate. The college-educated and highly skilled are prospering, while the wages of the lower-skilled have stalled or slipped backward. The working class is struggling to run in place.

Yale provides some textbook examples of the unbound market at work. Leading universities compete for the best of each other’s tenured faculty--people already secure as gems in a vault--and the average salary of a Yale professor has risen steadily to the current $94,000 a year.

But no one, as Yale administrators point out, is vying for their janitors and file clerks.

*

Yale’s senior vice president for finance and administration is Joe Mullinix, an affable-enough man who looks nothing like his piggish caricature on the wall at union headquarters. In the economic badminton of collective bargaining, he insists, “It’s time for the union to give something back.”

Yale has a payroll of 9,400, of which 3,700 belong to the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees. About 1,100 maintenance and dining hall workers are in one local, 2,600 secretaries and other office personnel in another.

The two locals, working without a contract since Jan. 22, took turns with 30-day strikes in February and April. A reservoir of bad blood complicates any deal-making. There have been seven strikes here since 1968, a high number for any unionized college or university--or any workplace, for that matter.

By most reckonings, the union has won several big victories over the years. Full-time clerical workers average $24,500 a year, a competitive wage in Connecticut. Among their ample benefits are free health care and 51 paid days off, including sick time.

In the other local, average pay is $29,000. Yale says its cooks and food servers are the best paid in the nation. During summers, with the dining halls shut, the employees are guaranteed substitute work around campus.

“It is an outrageously generous package,” said Peter Vallone, another administrator. He went on to describe how Yale is hamstrung by “idiotic” union work rules. In an after-hours plumbing emergency, managers must offer the job to off-duty employees by order of seniority, then pay for six hours of labor even if the work requires a few minutes.

Faced with this and other examples, union leaders sheepishly admit that some of the rules need to be rewritten. What they adamantly resist, however, are Yale’s ambiguous demands for subcontracting rights.

In ongoing negotiations, the university has refused to specify what work it wants to contract out. Instead, it asks to be trusted, vowing there are no plans for mass layoffs. And it offers this lure. If the union will accept its deal, Yale promises to keep everyone now on the payroll for six more years.

The union smells an ambush. As some people quit or retire, will Yale replace them with union workers? And what happens after six years?

“We think they want to roll back the clock and take away what we’ve won in bargaining,” said Robert Proto, the steamfitter who is president of one of the locals.

“Yale’s the biggest employer in New Haven. . . . Their great economics department can tell you what would happen to the quality of life here if wages go down at Yale. And if they get to bring in subcontractors, Yale washes their hands of responsibility: It’s not them paying low wages and no benefits. It’s somebody else.”

*

The university is a peculiar presence in run-down New Haven (population: 119,600), where 21% of the residents live below the poverty line. Yale’s $1-billion annual budget is three times that of the city’s; in a pinch, the college can count on its $4-billion endowment, lately a wellspring of more than $1 million a day in interest. Yale’s peculiarity, however, involves more than wealth. Its neo-Gothic silhouette seems almost a mirage amid the urban decay.

Mark Wilson, a union janitor, recalls how he once felt mystified by all the immense buildings with their cathedral windows and lordly towers. “It looks like a castle,” he said. “You wonder if the inside is as old as the outside. You know, do they use candles for lights?”

The town-and-gown relationship has often been troubled. But in recent years, under the presidency of economist Richard Levin, Yale has been widely applauded for its community involvement. Without a doubt, the university is vital to the city. It employs one in six of its workers.

Union leaders try to use this dependence to their advantage: By hurting the union, the university hurts New Haven, they say. They portray Yale as a place in moral paralysis, “the worst kind of corporate offender, trying to cut wages not because it must but because it can.”

Among their allegations is this: The university exploits “casual” workers. In the Yale lexicon, casuals are temporaries kept on call. The union says dozens of them work nearly full time, denied permanent jobs so Yale can avoid paying benefits.

One of the casuals they point to is Wanda Atkins, a single mother of four. Atkins said she usually works 32 hours a week in the dining halls, a pattern more or less maintained over the past four years. “My 7-year-old girl has asthma,” she said. “I’m someone who really needs those benefits.”

Mullinix, the Yale vice president, admits such a thing is “possible,” but insists it is nowhere near as commonplace as the union suggests. Indeed, university records show that Atkins worked only an average of 10 hours a week during the past year--and a total of three hours the entire year before.

*

As the labor dispute has gone on, with the “facts sheets” of both sides canceling each other out, confusion is understandable. A poll of 892 students in the campus paper, published March 7, found 35% to be pro-Yale and 20% pro-union. That left 45% calling themselves neutral or undecided.

The university has surely reached some students through their stomachs. In a hugely popular plan, Yale wants to bring fast-food chains onto campus--pizza, tacos, the full smorgasbord of junk cuisine. For these outlets to be profitable, administrators say, the labor must be subcontracted or union workers must accept lower wages. “We can’t sell burritos for $4 when students are used to paying $2,” said Fryer, the Yale spokesman.

If the union is branded as anti-pizza, students also consider the membership to be rude. A strike in the dining halls may have been an inconvenience, but chanting on the picket lines at 7 a.m. was inexcusable. Beyond this, there is the customary griping about the quality of union labor. How can janitors expect better pay when bathroom “hairs, both long and short, cover the floor and clog the sink?” asked student Govindini Murty in a column in the Yale Daily News.

On the union side, zealous students formed support groups. “I always thought of Yale as the benevolent old man in a tweed suit thinking of weighty matters, but really he wears a power suit and behaves ruthlessly,” said senior Nick Allen.

Those students unwilling to cross picket lines had a dilemma. Most professors refused to switch their classes to makeshift quarters in churches and apartments. Two of senior Jon Zerolnick’s four courses were moved off campus, and he opted to drop “Plato and the Modern World,” which did not. But he stayed with an on-campus seminar about the philosopher John Rawls.

“What could I do?” he said. “I needed that course to graduate.”

Michael Denning, a young, outspoken professor of American studies, was one of several dozen faculty members who signed a letter critical of the administration. “Rather than following national trends, Yale should be setting an example . . . based on good jobs at decent wages,” it read.

But this was a minority view and Denning thinks he knows why. “Yale is a liberal place, but one of the great crises in America is this extraordinary disconnect between liberalism and unionism,” he said. “Richard Levin’s about as liberal a president as we’ve had here and just look what’s going on.”

Down the corridor is the office of Gaddis Smith, a man with an endowed chair in the history department, 35 years on the faculty, someone Denning calls a bellwether liberal: As people like Gaddis Smith go, so goes Yale.

The older professor shuttled back and forth with his answers, on the one hand this, on the other hand that. “I think the university is right, but I’m sorry that it’s right,” he said. “It’s right because . . . industries need to control costs and run more efficiently and Yale needs to work on that too.

“And I’m saddened because I’m uneasy by the kinds of jobs that will be available to people who work for [subcontractors] without benefits and job security. I’m sorry to see the country moving toward a society of temps.”

The wavering finally stopped: “It comes down to what kind of leadership a university should demonstrate. We primarily try to express our leadership in scholarly endeavors. We don’t necessarily want to be known as a unique garden of Eden for campus employees who enjoy privileges not enjoyed anywhere else in the country.”

*

Among speakers scheduled for the protest rally is the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He is calling it “the people’s commencement.” The AFL-CIO hierarchy will be represented by Richard Trumka, the mine worker who is its No. 2 official. A brass band and a rock group are scheduled to perform.

Each union announcement further exasperates Yale. “We’re concerned that this great day will be turned into some kind of melee,” Vallone said.

To get the workers to call off the rally, the university offered to put union literature on each chair at commencement but the arrangement was turned down.

Now, Yale has some choices to make. Will it change the route of the procession to Old Campus? Will it delay the morning start of the ceremony?

“Whatever, we’ll have our party anyway,” said Vincent O’Brien, the AFL-CIO’s assistant field director.

O’Brien has been here for weeks, doing logistics. As he walked around Old Campus, dressed even more casually than the students, he envisioned the big day: workers arm in arm, the logjam in the streets, the swarm of discontent. He is a union old-timer, trying to conjure some spirits to revive the movement.

And he loves what he is up to. “When you find an employer of this size, wealth, arrogance, stature and prestige, and you can find an Achilles’ heel, that’s great.” But will there be trouble? “A ton of [union] marshals will be out there. And the early hour will help us. The drinking will be at a minimum.”

Around campus, there is much speculation about the coming effects of all this imported commotion. Gaddis Smith, among others, believes the din won’t make it over the rooftops and into the quadrangle. Old Campus has such tall and solid sentries, all those four- and five-story buildings that encase it.

But Vincent O’Brien claims otherwise. Experts in acoustics--union men--have checked it out, he said. “Don’t worry. The CEOs of tomorrow will hear us.”

Like a lot of things, including the revival of social movements, it may ultimately depend on the strength and direction of restless winds.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to the reporting of this story.