Yale is nowhere near awake, but the early hour, 5:45 a.m., hasn't stopped almost 40 members of Local 35 from showing up for work. Of course, work now means a stint on the sidewalk carrying signs and repeating slogans, but it's work nonetheless.
The sun has turned Harkness Tower golden and managed to make even the YCC banners hanging from Durfee look somewhat noble. The strikers are chatting amongst themselves; one murmurs a resigned "one more Monday." A sympathetic honk from a passing car goes unnoticed. It's a beautiful morning-crisp, not quite chilly. And for five workers, it's another morning to try to understand why they're standing out on the cold sidewalk, waiting for yet another march across campus.
If Clarence Randolph looks tired, he has an excuse-he worked until 11:30 p.m. last night at his other job, then had to get up before 5 a.m. this morning to show up at the lines on time. And now that he's here, there's not much to do except talk sports.
"He's a New England fan," he says, pointing to a fellow striker wearing a Patriots jacket. "I hate New England. I hate the colors. I hate UConn-the women's team's good, but the men suck."
"Hey, if you don't like it, get the hell out!" the Patriots fan replies. The two men laugh, agree they both hate the Steelers, and get back to the job of keeping warm on this cold morning.
Randolph works at Yale on weekdays and has a second job at St. Raphael's Hospital every weekend and holiday. His work schedule means he doesn't get a Saturday to relax or a restful day off on Labor Day; he's at work every day, almost 365 days a year.
Still, he has no insurance, no pension plan, no benefits of any kind. Despite working 22-25 hours a week at Yale-which rises to 40 hours a week during the summer-and 16 hours or more each week at the hospital, he is below benefit-level for both jobs. Yale requires a worker to work 20 hours a week to receive benefits and, although he always works more than that, the hour of overtime he works every day doesn't count in the University's eyes.
"Two and a half more hours, I get benefits," Randolph explains. "Two and a half more hours. I work more than that every week." He says employees should, after a year of employment and doing well on evaluations, get the extra time they need to get benefits. "I think that's fair."
Now 35, he's trying to get another job, as a nurse's assistant, but he failed the certification test. "If you haven't taken a test in years, you need some practice, and I didn't have it," he says. But, for the moment, he likes his job at Yale, even without benefits. "I enjoy working here. It's a pretty nice job. Where else can you get sick days working 17.5 hours a week? It's a nice working environment. And my supervisor here doesn't have a big head, like at the Inside the car hospital."
But he's not optimistic about getting a contract anytime soon. "It doesn't look like they're going to bend. Hopefully things will work out."
As he speaks, a homeless man pushes a cart up to the street and waits for the light to change. "But I'm glad I'm not like that," Randolph says.
"Yale Police are like the Gestapo, out here looking stupid," Local 35 member Paulo Taylor explains. "Ever see Hogan's Heroes? They think they're in charge, but the prisoners get away with whatever they want."
Taylor, who has worked in the Bursar's Office for four years, is full of historical analogies this morning. In the span of five minutes, Yale Police become Nazi stormtroopers, the University becomes Communist Russia, and Local 35 becomes a lost tribe of Israel, enslaved in Egypt. ("O great Pharoah, let my people go!" he says. "But Pharoah's heart is still hard!")
Although single at 32-"I'm waiting on God to give me my wife"-Taylor has to take care of his grandmother, so the decision to walk out wasn't easy. "In the beginning, I was thinking about not striking," he admits. "But at the last minute, I figured I'd try it out and see if I liked it."
And no one has done more than Taylor to makesure he likes it.
Perhaps some strikers spend time, like Taylor, critiquing some of the women who pass by. And maybe some, like Taylor, hid their cleaning equipment in their offices so replacement workers wouldn't be able to find it. But do many point their bullhorn at passing cars to make drivers think they're about to get shot-just to see the looks on their faces? Do many pretend morning joggers are running the Boston Marathon and chant "Go! Go! Go!" as they pass?
Taylor does, and it's all part of his plan. "What's the point of being out here if we can't enjoy ourselves a bit?"
Few strikers seem to take as much glee in making noise-or telling stories about making noise-as Taylor. "It's 6:30 one morning and I started with the bullhorn," he begins. "Then some girl across the street [in Wright Hall] leans out her window and says, 'I would appreciate it if you would stop making noise.'
"You know what I told her? 'Get over it! We're on strike-we're supposed to make noise!' So I started announcing the time: 'It's 6:35 a.m.!'"
Of course, the main enemy of early morning noisemakers is the police. A New Haven city ordinance prohibits making lots of noise before 8 a.m. and cops enforce the rule. Not surprisingly, Taylor doesn't like having Yale police telling him what to do and does what he can to get around regulations. "We can't do what we want on the lines," he says. "They keep us on a tight leash-or try to, at least."
"Sometimes we'll start joking with a cop to get them looking in one direction and start acting up in the other direction," he says. "Or maybe the noisemakers go off 'accidentally' once in a while.
"The cops are cheap and rotten. They act like they own the place. The first day of the strike, a cop came up to me and said, 'Look, I can be your friend.' I told him I don't need him as a friend. I just want to make him earn his paycheck."
Like Randolph's, Taylor's supervisors ask him to work two or three hours of overtime each day; he is only three hours below the benefit level. But he refuses to do the extra work. "Some people take the extra money, but I just do my job and get out of there. Yale takes everything, they have all this money, and they don't want to give benefits. If they remember who they met on the way up, they won't have to see us on the way down."
"We're not taking any crap. It's not our fault we're out here."
"Oh, yeah, we'll be out here again," Mitchell Weiner says about the next strike, planned for when classes restart in September. "I'm sure of that."
Weiner is busy watching his dog, Jim, sniff out his new friend, the puppy of Susan Hampton, a Berkeley custodial worker. Both Weiner and Hampton bring their dogs to the lines every day, where they strike from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (Weiner says Jim is named for Jimmy Hoffa: "He's my union dog.")
Weiner works 40 hours a week at the Art Gallery and also has a part-time job at the New Haven Jewish Federation. He's been at Yale for 14 years and says University-union relations have gotten much worse. "The last 10 years haven't been good. You can feel the pressure at work. They resent us a lot."
Weiner has his theories about why there seem to be so many labor problems at Yale, and most of them play on standard stereotypes that many city residents have about the University. "The Administration is a bunch of greedy old men making decisions out on their yachts," he says. "They're all puppets of the Corporation."
Hampton isn't so ideological; she feels sorry for the inconveniences a strike can cause. "I feel really bad for all the seniors, and I apologized to the ones I know," she says. She also feels sorry for those in management who've had to take up the slack. "Poor Gene [her supervisor, Eugene Wells] has been working his butt off. I've talked to kids who say they see him working all day Saturday and every night."
But the threat of subcontracting is enough to keep her on the lines. "Subcontracting means I don't have a job, pure and simple. Those companies don't even pay $5 an hour."
Hampton is a widow with children, so a strike is especially painful for her. "I remember when I went looking for work in 1988, all the businesses were closing," she says. "I picked Yale because I figured it's been around for hundreds of years, so it's probably going to be around for another 30 or so. I guess it will, but it looks like we won't be," she adds.
How long will this all last? "I don't know. It's scary," Hampton says as she pets her puppy. "We'll be out here again in September. We're not going to get anything resolved in this strike. I knew that in the beginning. But we're showing Yale we care about our jobs. That we'll fight for them."
"You know," Weiner says, "last year I bought a house in New Haven through the Homebuyers' Program," the Administration's economic-incentive package which encourages University employees to live in the city. Weiner pauses. "And now they want to throw us out of work."
Carlton Phillips, 25, has been watching the morning unroll quietly, standing outside the Berkeley gate. A part-time student at Gateway Community College, he says he can survive a few weeks without a paycheck. "But most of these people aren't like me," he says. "They pay bills like anyone else. Yale's definitely playing hardball."
Phillips believes that many of the workers would be happy with a contract just like the one they signed in 1992. "But they're so far from that. Who's going to sign what they have out there now?"
He sees one way to reach an agreement. "If the students did something, that would change things. If they would complain to Mommy and Daddy about how bad things are, that would turn the page."
"This place has a double personality. It's a wonderful institution of learning, of humanity. On the other hand, they're saying, 'We're going to do anything we can to tear these lives apart.' I just don't understand."
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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