This letter in today's YDN is a whirlwind ride through the classics of anti-GESO rhetoric:

The Graduate Employee Student Organization (GESO) is not a union. Let's not call teaching fellows' failure to show up for work a "strike" ("GESO issues strike threat," 4/7). Let's call it failure to show up for work. Yale should withhold pay from and appropriately punish any TF who fails to do his or her work, just as the University would treat any other of its employees.

Yes, you read that right: Yale should treat TAs "just as the University would treat any other of its employees." But if they are indeed like any other employees, then don't they have the right to bargain collectively? And when they organize to exercise that right, isn't that a union? And when the workers in that union refuse to work in order to bring their employer to the negotiating table, isn't that a strike? The irony is that were Yale to recognize that its graduate employee teaching assistants have the same rights as other employees, there would be no need for this strike. Jon Fougner continues:

It's unclear to me how GESO ringleaders regularly work up the gall to hijack section time to propagandize.

Funny thing is, when professors and graduate students who oppose GESO use class time to slam GESO, you don't hear as much concern from the administration about the sacrifice of academic time. Same when it's, say, graduate students' advisors making veiled threats about how union support could destroy their career (more about these tactics, and their relationship to Fougner's citing the 2003 LOWV vote, in this report). Fougner says:

It's unclear to me why we should be sympathetic to strikes by the ruling class, whether they be professional hockey players or professional academicians.

Not only are GESO's members, who work for well under $20,000 a year and in many cases will work in not much more lucrative post-Doc positions after graduation because graduate students like them will be doing the jobs they would have wanted, not the ruling class, but to the extent that graduate school's like Yale's disproportionately represent particular slices of the American population it's precisely because of the absence of reforms like dependent healthcare and childcare which, if Fougner had his way, GESO would have nothing to say about and the YDN would give no coverage:

It's unclear to me that the News ought to let GESO use its front page as a free megaphone...What is clear is that GESO has accomplished little for its own members, and nothing for real laborers. Indeed, in 2001, while Harvard students were courageously bringing Massachusetts Hall to its knees over a "living wage" for university employees, GESO was opportunistically shanghaiing honest-to-God unions into its shifty, self-serving camp.

GESO has accomplished plenty for its members, who are indeed laborers, as everyone from the UN to the IRS has recognized. One of GESO's ongoing fights is for a living wage for all Yale employees, a fight in which teachers, researchers, service and maintenance workers, and clerical and technical workers - none of them dupes - have stood together with supporters throughout the city in demanding better.