In early January 2023, Yale University graduate workers, including teachers and researchers, voted 90 percent in favor of unionizing. Local 33 of Unite Here, is a sister union to Locals 34 and 35, which have represented Yale’s clerical, technical, housekeeping, grounds and food service workers on campus for decades.
More recently on Dec. 16, 99.4 percent of Local 33 members, representing 3,200 graduate teachers and researchers at Yale, voted in favor of a new contract. The vote came at the end of a year that has seen an explosion of union organizing and contract victories at several major educational institutions and within diverse industries across the U.S.
Local 33’s victory came after 30 years of staunch opposition from a succession of top Yale administrators and the Yale Corporation. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Sasha Tabachnikova, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in immunobiology and a member of the union bargaining committee. Here she talks about the contract she and other members won, and why she believes the vote was almost unanimous.
SASHA TABACHNIKOVA: It’s the first contract for Yale graduate students, grad workers, so I think that was incredibly exciting for people. I think there are so many history-making changes in this contract that everyone was obviously unanimously in support of the wage increases, the improvements to health care, a grievance procedure that covers fair treatment – none of these things were available to graduate workers at Yale before.
MELINDA TUHUS: Yeah, say a little more about each of those things if you would, like wage increases, and the different provisions to protect workers in the bargaining unit from, I don’t know, retaliation or just unfair treatment. Can you give us a little more specifics?
SASHA TABACHNIKOVA: Absolutely. I think in terms of wages for Ph.D. researchers and teachers, its 18-19 percent raise that goes into effect for the Spring semester, so very, very soon. And I know like, I started my Ph.D. during the pandemic, when I think rent prices in New Haven and around the country were stalled, but then with inflation and the end of the pandemic, rent has skyrocketed here.
There’s a lot of post-docs who live in New Haven. So people are spending the majority of their wages made through their Ph.D. programs on rent, so I think that’s a huge change. That means people have money to pay off loans; people have money to start savings accounts, send to their families, etc. Then in terms of teaching rates, those have gone up 35 percent and the hourly minimum also went up 30 percent and will go up even more over the course of the contract. So those are some of the things in terms of wages that I think people are really thrilled about.
In terms of health care, I think the piece that is really exciting is the new dental plan we have. Our dental plan used to not cover a lot of procedures, had a pretty low maximum and a very high individual contribution. And now we have a plan that is very comparable to that of our sister unions at Yale Local 34, the clerical and technical union, and Local 35, the custodial, janitorial union. It’s a much higher maximum, it’s a much more reasonable individual contribution and it covers a lot more procedures. I can’t tell you the amount of people who’ve had root canals that have been really expensive, who’ve gone back to their home countries to do those procedures because it wasn’t a tenable thing under our existing plan.
And then, in terms of fair treatment, it’s a very unique kind of job being a grad worker. Your entire future career depends on your boss: they’re your mentor and your boss. Situations happen, and there are existing university processes, but people don’t always trust those processes; those processes take a very long time. It’s very hard to get any kind of support through those processes. So having a grievance procedure that covers issues like discrimination, harassment, assault – it just gives people more avenues and also, importantly, a timeline to those processes and knowing they will be resolved and while they’re being resolved, our contract now has a provision around interim support measures while someone is filing a grievance.
MELINDA TUHUS: It’s just so interesting, because I’ve been covering this for 30 years and various administrations that have just pulled out all the stops to prevent grad workers from unionizing, and then under Biden’s NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) they finally got the right to have the vote, and it was overwhelming – 90 percent of people who voted. Do you have any insight into that?
SASHA TABACHNIKOVA: You know I think like all things in bargaining, overall it was a really respectful and efficient process and there was very good faith on both ends, so once there was a good amount of mutual trust between the union bargaining committee and the university bargaining committee.
I’m also proud of how fast this contract was negotiated, like we won our union about a year ago. I think once we understood each other’s priorities and that there’s a lot of shared interest in terms of keeping Yale competitive and making it a top choice school, we were able to negotiate them.
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