Yet again, behind the rhetoric of partnership Yale's leadership demonstrates a vision of crass division and stable inequality: A group of ministers accused Yale University on Tuesday of bringing Latino workers to the campus as strikebreakers to cause racial dissension among picketing maintenance workers. Two area cleaning firms delivered 40 to 50 Latinos to the Old Campus on Monday, and "paraded" them through a picket line of mainly African-American strikers in Local 35, according to the Rev. Emilio Hernandez. Hernandez said less than 5 percent of Yale’s workers are Latino, even though they make up 20 percent of the New Haven population. He said the ministers want to increase the presence of Latinos at Yale, but not as strikebreakers, and he accused Yale of trying to arouse racial confrontation. The ministers said several clergy tried to talk to the workers on Monday, but were asked by police to leave. Dan Smokler of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, which works closely with the strikers, said Tuesday members followed buses with workers from a company in West Haven to a parking lot in the city’s Fair Haven section, where they were transferred to Yale vans and brought to several of Yale’s residential colleges under security escort. He said the workers were told not to talk with the center’s volunteers or they would lose their jobs... Julie Gonzales, a junior at Yale’s Silliman College, said she was particularly offended by the hirings. "To see my university use these kinds of divisive tactics is like a kick in the stomach. A university that is committed to diversity should bring people together, rather than trying to break a strike," Gonzales said. This is the same strategy ONHSA ally Boise Kimber used in telling Ward 6 voters that Delores Colon represented the Latino threat to Blacks in New Haven. She won that race yesterday. This is the same thinking that convinced Bartlett Giamatti in the early 80's that Yale's predominately Black male service and maintenance workers and Yale's predominately White female clerical and technical workers would never go on strike together. This is the grand strategy that Yale has been depending on to crush the unions in this fight - the conviction that once the situation got intense, a coaltion of thousands of clerical, technical, maintenance, and service workers, teaching assistants and researchers, students, faculty, clergy, and community members would fracture quickly. So far, looks like Yale's leadership has a lot to learn. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is releasing a letter to President Levin condemning Yale's behavior today.