In this week's American Prospect, Harold Meyerson considers the lessons of HERE's triumph in making the Las Vegas hotels union business. Las Vegas is in today's service economy what Detroit once was in an industrial economy: a demonstration that a strong labor movement is the route to a strong middle class. The approach Meyerson describes - directing resources towards organizing towards high density, creating broad-based organizing committees, training rank-and-file to shoulder responsibility, partnering with management for real vocational training - are at the heart of the New Unity Partnership HERE President John Wilhelm and others are pushing for the AFL-CIO.

Saturday's rally was an incredible mobilization of support and solidarity, with - by police estimates - over 10,000 workers and students from all over the region and beyond coming together to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the movement for change. Yale students gathered in front of a banner towards the back; the front of the march was already at the Yale Medical school before we started moving. A dramatic presence of Yale undergrads was there to welcome huge students groups from Harvard, Swarthmore, and Columbia, as well as peers from just about everywhere else - including a few students from Florida and California. A significant number of the sixty-odd Internationals in the AFL-CIO were represented, including many more locals than I could count (Philly's HERE Local 634, where I worked this summer, was out in full force). The strongest felt presences, besides AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, were the leaders of four of the "New Unity Partnership" unions which have been increasingly publicly working together to try to push the AFL to prioritize dramatic organizing for the labor movement's survival - Andy Stern of SEIU, Bruce Raynor of UNITE, Doug McCarron of the Laborers, and Yale's own John Wilhelm of HERE - all of whom, with Sweeney and over a hundred others, took arrests for civil disobedience at the close of the march. Yale's new PR line, faced with the infeasability, one figures, of telling the press that the rally was not disruptive, or that it didn't really happen, or that Sweeney probably secretly thinks Yale's offer is better, is to say that the University was simply a convenient staging ground for a "union recruitment drive" that had little to do with Yale specifically. This is perhaps marginally more convincing than Yale's contention that Freshman Move-In Day went more smoothly than usual this time around and marginally less convincing than Yale's recent contention that it had been planning for years to implement proposals to racially desegregate its workforce and unfortunately didn't get a chance to tell the unions until the day after it was condemned for race-baiting by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Most of the organizing for this march happened over the course of about a week, and the thousands who gathered did so - as demonstrated by their speeches, by their signs, by their stickers - because they want to see justice for the thousands of men and women who make this University function, and for millions of working people in America as well. Like every vital and difficult labor fight, this one has vital broader implications - as did the 1984 strike, when newly organized clerical and technical workers wore buttons asserting that for women to make 59 cents on the dollar compared to men was unacceptable at Yale and everywhere else. Yale University, and Yale - New Haven Hospital, are the industries - "eds and meds," as Levin says - which will likely compose an even greater segment of the American workforce - itself increasingly a service economy - in this century. They possess, as my advisor Michael Denning argues, parallel structures, with low-wage service, maintenance, clerical, and technical workers at the bottom of a hierarchy with set-duration apprentice employees (graduate students, residents) in the middle and highly-trained "professionals" (Doctors, faculty) at the top. The prospects for decent contracts at these institutions are tied up in the prospects for economic justice for working people in this country. The movement here in New Haven - an alliance of service and maintenance workers, clerical and technical workers, teaching and research assistants, students and faculty, and clergy and community, built around common interest and shared vision - represents a cross-section of the labor movement and a microcosm of the broad-based organizing strategies that have historically worked for the labor movement in the country, and that represent its potential to revolutionize this country in the future. Yale's relationship to New Haven is a dramatic microcosm of the yawning and deepening economc divide in this country. The United States is becoming a nation of prosperous Yales and struggling New Havens, and the labor movement has a central role to play in reconciling the two. Unlike many employers, Yale cannot feasibly claim that its contracts are restrained by competition from local alternatives or sweatshops, or by the difficulty of remaining financially solvent. And unlike other employers, Yale cannot easily escape or elude the deserved scrutiny it attracts - nationally and beyond - when it spouts the rhetoric of partnership while clinging to the vestiges of feudalism. YaleInsider has a thorough breakdown of news coverage from the march, and of Yale's public statements Saturday. Jacob Remes '02, who came down to march with us, and who has been more skeptical of late of the prospects for victory at Yale, shares his experience of the march here.

My new YDN piece is on-line here. I like it (even without a few hundred cut words). You might too. To believe that it is Wilhelm, and not the workers who voted overwhelmingly one year ago to authorize a strike, that chose this job action, that it is Wilhelm, and not the workers, who voted overwhelmingly to reject Yale's offer again last spring, who decides what's worth fighting for, and that it is Wilhelm's promotion, and not their own futures for which workers are marching, is to suggest that the workers of Yale lack the savvy to know what's best for them. This is the attitude that Yale's leaders have brought consistently to the bargaining table, and that has brought our university to its ninth strike in 35 years.

Photos from the Yale strike are compiled here. The Times' latest analysis is here. In what some call a clash between blue collars and blue bloods, many of Yale's workers grew up in New Haven resenting Yale, feeling that it symbolized wealth and arrogance. For its part, Yale has a reputation of being inflexible in negotiations, angering many workers. Yale officials appear convinced that the university is New Haven's most generous employer and that its workers should be happy with their lot. Many Yale workers, seeing few other job opportunities in New Haven, believe that the best way to improve their lot is to remain at Yale and fight to improve wages and benefits. "You combine a union that is not uncomfortable with a very public approach to negotiations and using whatever types of leverage it can find, and a university that's taken a hard negotiating approach and stuck with it for a long period of time, and it's a volatile mix," said Richard Hurd, a labor relations professor at Cornell. He said Yale traditionally had a hard-line bargaining approach that resembled General Electric's: make an offer and refuse to budge. Some Yale administrators and students attribute the university's labor record to one man: John Wilhelm, a 1967 Yale graduate who is president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, the parent of the two union locals on strike. Mr. Wilhelm, widely viewed as one of labor's leading strategists, came to prominence within labor by leading the drive to unionize Yale's clerical workers. "For 35 years John Wilhelm has organized strikes at Yale," said Helaine Klasky, Yale's communications director. "This year is no different. He obviously believes that confrontation rather than cooperation is the best way to settle contract disputes." I'd be curious if there's anyone out there who finds the latter explanation more convincing than the former. My take will be in the YDN tomorrow. Today was the third meeting between Union and University leadership facilitated by Mayor DeStefano. Thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of our members on strike, we are now meeting with Yale decision makers," said Local 34 President Laura Smith. "Pensions are a key issue for all of us on strike. It's time to settle a package that gives us retirement with dignity," said local 35 President Bob Proto. It's about time. Oh - Akiba Hebrew Academy will open one day late on Monday after a last minute settlement between the union and administrators. Maybe my new place of study could learn something from my old one...

A few personal experiences and impressions of the past 72 hours: The eight Yale retirees (three of whom had to leave for medical reasons, five of whom held out for the full 24 hours) are real heroes whose perseverance is a model to all of us and whose victory presses the movement forward and raises the bar for everyone within it - and within this community. Their victory demonstrates the combination of strategically savvy and symbolically appropriate tactics, solidarity of workers, clergy, students and community, media scrutiny, organizing strength, sheer numbers, and iron will necessary for a victory like hasn't been seen here since the '84 strike. The whole episode, from the moment the eight declared that they weren't leaving David Swenson's office without a meeting to the moment that - poised to arrest them - Yale announced that it would instead grant their request, also dramatized both the shameful lengths to which Yale will go to perpetuate injustice and the potential and urgency to save Yale University from the Yale Corporation. The three times I was turned away and/or threatened with arrest by Yale police for trying to enter the Investment Building with hoagies for the retirees - who'd been hold up in the office for hours without food or use of the bathroom for several hours at this point - spoke volumes, as did the necessity for New Haven police to take jurisdiction because my University refused to allow food or bathroom facilities to a few elderly employees who showed up after decades of service to the University to confront the man who's been quietly investing their pension fund in insider trading rather than in decent pension offers for the next generation of Yale workers. It was the sight of fifteen riot police entering the building to drag out five senior citizens, however, that was most deeply infuriating, and Yale's last-minute realization that to have them do so would shame Yale's leadership such that it would become more difficult to carry forward its regressive agenda was small comfort. It's shameful that when light and truth rear their heads at Yale, Yale tries to lock out the light and starve out the truth. The TV media did a better-than-usual job of covering the sit-in, in part because it was visual and in part because of Rev. Jackson's presence. The most salient facts - why the retirees went in, that they won, and that Yale was poised to have riot police drag them out - came across on pretty much all the channels. The print media, including the YDN, was unfortunately dismissive of the drama, giving on average a sentence at the end of an article contextualizing the strike about a successful sit-in calling for a meeting but giving no sense of how or why it happened - or that it lasted 24 hours. As in the last strike, few experiences are more powerful than walking the lines and talking to workers about why they're out and what they're fighting for. There are few ways someone in this city of any political perspective (including, perhaps, readers of this site) could be doing with an hour on a weekday morning than talking to the men and women who, yet again, Yale has forced to the point of challenge and personal sacrifice for lux and veritas. I met a fourth grader who's walking the picket lines for the fourth time because, he explained, of a very greedy man who isn't very good at sharing his toys. Jesse Jackson, Emelio Hernandez, David Lee, and others have brought home over the past few days a point that cannot be emphasized enough: the civil rights movement cannot be separated from the movement for economic justice without destroying the integriy of the movement and insulting the dignity of those who compose it. On day after the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, this point has a particular urgency. It's strange how much more easily middle class Americans tend to believe that the liberty of bosses is contingent on their right to private property than that the freedom of workers is contingent on their right to wages. A classmate once accused me of disgracing the memory of MLK by wearing a pin with a photo of him at an SEIU 1199 rally (the union he often described as his "favorite union"). When I asked how it was inappropriate to celebrate a photo of an event that actually happened he suggested that MLK must have been caught by coincidence standing in front of an SEIU podium. To say that where a woman can sit on a bus is a moral issue but whether she can raise enough money to feed her family is merely a political question is a convenient but fundamentally unjust contention. Today was one of the most intense freshman move-in days Yale has seen. The civil disobedience was of a much more serious and more dramatic character than last September, and the picket lines were some of the thickest and loudest I've seen here. The UOC gave out several hundred copies of our new pamphlet to freshmen and families, most of whom came off understandably as mostly overwhelmed, confused, anxious, and eager to get more information. Yale forced our table off of Old Campus on the grounds that, in the words of Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg, we were there "to bias freshmen, not to orient them." Meanwhile, the Office of New Haven and State Affairs had three tables set up trying to get students on board with their agenda of condescension and division by giving our lollipops and tape measures. And the crew team had a thirty foot boat in the middle of campus. Yale police also stopped us from entering dorms to poster; one man told me I wasn't allowed to enter with the poster I had and when I asked whether I could go in to put up, say, a capella posters, he referred me to his boss, who told me no one was allowed to enter with any kind of poster and then asked to see my posters. When I confronted Dean Brodhead about this he told me that I wasn't being forced off of Old Campus myself, and so democracy was intact. As we already knew, Scott Marks is a much better speaker than Jesse Jackson; John Wilhelm is a much better speaker than John Sweeney; Howard Dean is a much better speaker than Joe Lieberman. Yale's last minute decision to postpone tomorrow's freshman invocation, an event which to my knowledge has never been cancelled in the University's history (including during, say, World War), on the grounds of "the threat posed by our unions," represents a resounding acknowledgement by Yale that contrary to their publicity, business is not going on as usual here, and the crisis is not under control. John Wilhelm was right to say, of of Yale's prior claims that hardly anyone was out on strike and there was no disruption, "That's exactly the problem - you do all the work here, and Yale can't see you." He also added that - as Yale's contract offer makes clear - Yale can't count. This was abundantly clear when Yale produced statistics purporting to show that strike turnout was low which left out 800 Yale workers - guess where they were? Perhaps one of them was Associate VP for New Haven and State Affairs Mike Morand's secretary, who despite getting ample exposure to Yale's side - which Conroy et al claim the union leadership is blinding the workers to - is out on strike.