"[Flex dollars] improve the local economy by pouring what would have been unused dining money into area restaurants," the lead editorial of the Yale Daily News wrote on Sept. 6. The Daily's logic is certainly right. Yale students during the course of their college careers transfer huge sums of cash from their parents to the "area economy." It's tourist money, really - earned elsewhere by the well-to-do, spent here and oftentimes not earned back with local jobs.

Then, what are we to make of the following? "Union leaders argue that Flex Dollars hurt the area economy by granting huge swaths of student business to a few restaurants, thereby depriving everyone of a fair chance," from the YDN of Sept. 18.

What could this possibly mean? Nothing in the way of economic logic, that much is for certain. It is true that only a few restaurants take Flex Dollars, but if that is the problem, then the solution is to expand the program. Give "everyone a fair chance," to use a phrase popular with the unions. They, however, would prefer you to narrow down your choice of area restaurants to themselves. Not very fair, indeed.

Welcome to the months prior to the strike of 1996. The spinmasters are already at work, and you shouldn't be surprised if from reading the faxed press releases of Locals 34 and 35 you imagine yourself living in the Chiapas region of Mexico, surrounded by poor peasant movements,, albeit ones with sophisticated desktop publishing equipment. The unions' leaders that I have read and heard have all of the right rhetoric - "slipping away from greatness," "lacking a vision," et al. - but not enough practice to convince the objective bystander of their sincerity; rhetorical tools are still clumsy in their hands.

But they're getting better. Take the "fair chance" quote, for example. The problem is not that Flex Dollars are unfair. The problem is that Yale unions form their own labor monopoly, and charge monopoly labor prices. Yale dining-hall workers earn among the best food-service salaries anywhere, and in an area not exactly devoid of cheap labor. It is even said that the unions enjoy wage and health benefits superior to those of many faculty members.

As monopolies, they despise "subcontracting," which is what the Flex Dollars plan is, more or less. Subcontracting means that the Administration might find employees willing to work for less than monopoly wages. And the unions, desperate (like most monopolies) to remain as they are, rightfully see the Flex Dollars plan as (for them) a dangerous precedent.

Let's take another example of nascent propaganda. "Yale tuition has gone up by an average of 6.8 percent per year for the last five years....Why does Yale keep raising tuition if the money's not really needed?" asked the flyer distributed to frosh on Moving-In Day.

What do the unions think? Do they picture President Levin as the Michael Douglas-like arch-capitalist, counting his millions deep within Woodbridge Hall, and laughing insanely to himself while chanting "Geso! GESO! GESO!!!"? Or perhaps he's hoarding the endowment "surplus" into Swiss bank accounts, awaiting the day he has to fight extradition back to the States for Crimes against Labor.

Believe it or not, I can see the unions' dilemma. Part of the problem lies in the structure of Yale's dining halls. Most were constructed in the 1920's and 1930's, and back then both the technology and the propriety of the times demanded that different colleges have different kitchens. Dinner was much more formal: you wore a suit, you came at a certain time, you were served by waiters.

Such a system in today's world is ludicrously inefficient. Think about it in an economic sense: you have 5,000 people, and, for no particular reason, you decide to feed them at different places in 12 arbitrarily divided groups. Not only that, but you must cook the food separately for each individual group. The more efficient way would be to feed everyone at a central location, and cook the food all at once.

Of course, the latter system would be positively hateful, even if it were more efficient. Point is, the University wants to cut costs, improve food quality, and scale down the labor force while not changing the fundamental structural problem. And they mean to do this with the occult art of technology. The Flex Dollars plan is one attempt to effect just the sort of technological change that could make the dining halls more economically rational.

And the unions fought Flex Dollars hard. Having become accustomed to their monopoly wages, they are not apt to give them away easily. These $10+/hour wages have become more than luxuries; they have become, in the union's view, a kind of entitlement. So they can speak seriously of the University being greedy with its endowment "surplus," a surplus none of the unions had any part in creating.

"Yale is very, very rich. They could spend the money on us if they wanted to," said Nancy Ryan, a union spokesman, as quoted in the YDN. Her assertion is, of course, absolutely true. And it also constitutes a powerful reason why the Administration should be firm with the unions in the upcoming strike.

Patrick Stephenson is a senior in Morse.

Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.

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