Federation of Hospital and University Employees
Encyclopedia
The Federation of Hospital And University Employees is a coalition of labor unions in New Haven, Connecticut
, United States, which represents thousands of workers at Yale University
and Yale-New Haven Hospital
. The federation currently includes recognized unions UNITE HERE
Locals 34 and 35, which represent university food service, maintenance, and custodial workers, and clerical and technical workers, respectively. UNITE HERE has also, for the last fifteen years, supported the organizing efforts of graduate student teachers and researchers in the Graduate Employees and Students Organization
. Finally, the Federation also includes the 150 dietary workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital
who are members of Local 1199NE
of the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU). Since 1998, this union has conducted an organizing campaign of about 1,800 other blue-collar service workers at the hospital. On March 22, 2006, the union and hospital agreed to an agreement governing the conduct of both parties in a neutral election process by which hospital employees will be able to vote on whether to unionize.
(HERE) and merged with a union of textile and laundry workers in 2004 to become UNITE HERE. The service and maintenance and physical plant workers who comprised the federation's membership were at this time all grouped into Local 35.
The union's origins thus lie in the wave of militant and ambitious organizing precipitated by the CIO
in the 1930s and 1940s, as the immigrant workers who had built and staffed Yale's new residential colleges began to organize themselves into an industrial union with the aid of CIO organizer John Clark and several sympathetic professors in Yale's Divinity School. For a detailed account of this story see Deborah Sue Elkin, Labor and The Left: The Limits of Acceptable Dissent at Yale University, 1920s to 1950s, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1995.
In 1953 the union engaged in a two-week strike for a maintenance of membership clause in its contract with the university. In 1968, the union, which had been quiescent throughout the 1950s and early sixties even as Yale president Kingman Brewster introduced two corporate executives from the Inland Steel Corporation to govern the university's Human Resource department with a Taylorist ethic. See Herbert Janick, "Yale Blue: Unionization at Yale University, 1931-1985", Labor History, 1987 28(3).
In 1968, the union struck again, lasting a week and voting by a slim margin to accept a contract which many workers felt was substandard. ("Union votes to End Strike", Yale Daily News, 5/9/68.) Students served as temporary replacement workers and the union's business agent, NY Lawyer Moss Schenk, was fired and replaced with New Haven labor leader Vincent J. Sirabella, the president of the New Haven Central Labor Council.
The union struck again in 1971, 1974, and 1977. These strikes were each longer than the last and were each the longest strikes in the university's history at the time of their conclusion. (The 1977 strike lasted 13 weeks and is still the longest strike Yale has ever seen.)
Beginning in the late 1940s, but really taking off in the mid-late 1960s, came successive attempts to organize the feminized, "pink-collar" workforce of Yale's clerical and technical employees by District 65, the Office and Professional Employees International Union
(OPEIU), and the United Auto Workers
(UAW). In 1983, a homegrown organizing drive by HERE to organize these workers finally succeeded. The union, HERE Local 34, won a National Labor Relations Board
election by six votes in the face of intimidation tactics by university management and entrenched structures of favoritism and nepotistic promotion. When the university refused to negotiate a first contract with Local 34, workers began a ten-week strike on September 26, 1984. Local 35 members refused to cross their sister local's picket lines and joined their strike. Undergraduates and graduate students mobilized to support them. The strike attracted national attention from inside and outside the labor movement and was a beacon of light in a dark time for U.S. union movements when Yale settled on the terms of a contract with first the victorious Local 34 and then on an unprecedented contract with Local 35 as well. (See Toni Gilpin, Gary Isaac,
Dan Letwin, and Jack McKivigan, On Strike For Respect, (updated edition: University of Illinois Press, 1995.)
In 1990, teaching and research assistants in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences decided to organize a union, GESO, and affiliated with the federation. There were several strikes in the 1990s, including two successive one month walkouts by Locals 35 and 34, respectively, in the spring semester of 1996. The 1996 strike was concerned primarily with the issue of subcontracting. During the strike, Local 35 organized nearly 300 casual workers into its bargaining unit, but Yale inserted a loophole into the contract which gave it the ability to subcontract work in any new or renovated buildings, and then promptly began a campaign to renovate nearly all of its major buildings.
In 1998 the federation struck a partnership with the SEIU to organize approximately 1800 unorganized workers at Yale-New Haven hospital, and the Federation became a multi-union, collaborative endeavor, The Federation of Hospital and University Employees.
In January 2002, the union's contract with the university expired. The union had agreed to a six-year, rather than a four-year contract during the previous negotiation cycle in order to avoid labor strife during the university's tercentennial celebrations. The university hired John Stepp of Restructuring Associates, Inc. to facilitate Interest-based bargaining in the hopes of avoiding the rancorous disputes of past contract cycles. In May 2002, Yale abruptly terminated Stepp's employment without previously notifying the federation. On September 25, 2002, 675 workers, students, and other members of the New Haven community were arrested in an act of mass civil disobedience.
In January, 2003, the union offered to enter into binding arbitration with the university, but administrators refused the offer. A one-week long strike took place between March 3 and March 7, 2003, garnering support from Cornel West
, Jesse Jackson
, John Sweeney
, Dennis Rivera
, John Wilhelm, and Andy Stern
, as well as thousands of workers, thousands of members of the community who marched on the university on the strike's first day to demand equal access to jobs and the desegregation of the university's hiring structures, and hundreds of undergraduates, who staged a walkout on the strike's snowy fourth day and held classes in the street.
With negotiations effectively dead over the summer, the Federation struck again in late August, after a group of retirees occupied the university's investment office to demand to know the status and whereabouts of a university-administered pension fund. The strike was settled on September 18, 2003 after several days of negotiations mediated by New Haven Mayor John Destefano and a 10,000-strong labor march which shut down downtown New Haven five days earlier.
In April, 2005, GESO struck again for one week and continues to campaign, with the support of the rest of the Federation, for union recognition.
--a part of the Taft-Hartley
amendments--bans security guards from belonging to the same union as other workers of the same employer without the employer's permission. This prohibition extends beyond belonging to the same local or even the same international union; security officers cannot belong to any AFL-CIO
affiliated union if other employees are members of an affiliate. The Yale administration has withheld its permission, so the university's police officers and security guards are not members of FHUE. Officers of the Yale University Police Department are members of the Yale Police Benevolent Association, which affiliated in 2005 with the Connecticut Organization for Public Safety Employees, an independent union. In 2010, Yale security officers were initially organized by AFSCME, an AFL-CIO affiliate union. Yale objected on section(9)(b)(3) grounds, and the National Labor Relations Board
sided with the employer. Instead, the security officers voted to join the International Union of Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America.
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
, United States, which represents thousands of workers at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
and Yale-New Haven Hospital
Yale-New Haven Hospital
Yale-New Haven Hospital , Connecticut's largest hospital with 966 beds, is located in New Haven, Connecticut.The hospital is owned and operated by the Yale New Haven Health System, Inc...
. The federation currently includes recognized unions UNITE HERE
UNITE HERE
UNITE HERE is a labor union in the United States and Canada with more than 265,000 active members The union's members work predominantly in the hotel, food service, laundry, warehouse, and casino gaming industries...
Locals 34 and 35, which represent university food service, maintenance, and custodial workers, and clerical and technical workers, respectively. UNITE HERE has also, for the last fifteen years, supported the organizing efforts of graduate student teachers and researchers in the Graduate Employees and Students Organization
Graduate Employees and Students Organization
The Graduate Employees and Students Organization is a group of graduate student teachers and researchers which is trying to be recognized as a union at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut....
. Finally, the Federation also includes the 150 dietary workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital
Yale-New Haven Hospital
Yale-New Haven Hospital , Connecticut's largest hospital with 966 beds, is located in New Haven, Connecticut.The hospital is owned and operated by the Yale New Haven Health System, Inc...
who are members of Local 1199NE
SEIU Local 1199NE
The SEIU Local 1199NE is a local union of the Service Employees International Union in the United States. It represents 20,000 health care workers in the New England area....
of the Service Employees International Union
Service Employees International Union
Service Employees International Union is a labor union representing about 1.8 million workers in over 100 occupations in the United States , and Canada...
(SEIU). Since 1998, this union has conducted an organizing campaign of about 1,800 other blue-collar service workers at the hospital. On March 22, 2006, the union and hospital agreed to an agreement governing the conduct of both parties in a neutral election process by which hospital employees will be able to vote on whether to unionize.
History
The Federation of University Employees was formed in 1951 when Local 142 of the United Construction Workers-CIO, representing custodial and maintenance workers at Yale University, disaffiliated with its international union in favor of fiscal and strategic independence. In 1955, the union organized food service workers in Yale's residential college dining halls and, a year later, affiliated with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union, which later changed its name to the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International UnionHotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union
The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union , was a United States labor union representing workers of the hospitality industry, formed in 1891. In 2004, HERE merged with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees to form UNITE HERE. HERE notably organized the staff of Yale...
(HERE) and merged with a union of textile and laundry workers in 2004 to become UNITE HERE. The service and maintenance and physical plant workers who comprised the federation's membership were at this time all grouped into Local 35.
The union's origins thus lie in the wave of militant and ambitious organizing precipitated by the CIO
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
in the 1930s and 1940s, as the immigrant workers who had built and staffed Yale's new residential colleges began to organize themselves into an industrial union with the aid of CIO organizer John Clark and several sympathetic professors in Yale's Divinity School. For a detailed account of this story see Deborah Sue Elkin, Labor and The Left: The Limits of Acceptable Dissent at Yale University, 1920s to 1950s, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1995.
In 1953 the union engaged in a two-week strike for a maintenance of membership clause in its contract with the university. In 1968, the union, which had been quiescent throughout the 1950s and early sixties even as Yale president Kingman Brewster introduced two corporate executives from the Inland Steel Corporation to govern the university's Human Resource department with a Taylorist ethic. See Herbert Janick, "Yale Blue: Unionization at Yale University, 1931-1985", Labor History, 1987 28(3).
In 1968, the union struck again, lasting a week and voting by a slim margin to accept a contract which many workers felt was substandard. ("Union votes to End Strike", Yale Daily News, 5/9/68.) Students served as temporary replacement workers and the union's business agent, NY Lawyer Moss Schenk, was fired and replaced with New Haven labor leader Vincent J. Sirabella, the president of the New Haven Central Labor Council.
The union struck again in 1971, 1974, and 1977. These strikes were each longer than the last and were each the longest strikes in the university's history at the time of their conclusion. (The 1977 strike lasted 13 weeks and is still the longest strike Yale has ever seen.)
Beginning in the late 1940s, but really taking off in the mid-late 1960s, came successive attempts to organize the feminized, "pink-collar" workforce of Yale's clerical and technical employees by District 65, the Office and Professional Employees International Union
Office and Professional Employees International Union
The Office and Professional Employees International Union is a trade union in the United States representing 110,416 white-collar workers in the public and private sector....
(OPEIU), and the United Auto Workers
United Auto Workers
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
(UAW). In 1983, a homegrown organizing drive by HERE to organize these workers finally succeeded. The union, HERE Local 34, won a National Labor Relations Board
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the United States government charged with conducting elections for labor union representation and with investigating and remedying unfair labor practices. Unfair labor practices may involve union-related situations or instances of...
election by six votes in the face of intimidation tactics by university management and entrenched structures of favoritism and nepotistic promotion. When the university refused to negotiate a first contract with Local 34, workers began a ten-week strike on September 26, 1984. Local 35 members refused to cross their sister local's picket lines and joined their strike. Undergraduates and graduate students mobilized to support them. The strike attracted national attention from inside and outside the labor movement and was a beacon of light in a dark time for U.S. union movements when Yale settled on the terms of a contract with first the victorious Local 34 and then on an unprecedented contract with Local 35 as well. (See Toni Gilpin, Gary Isaac,
Dan Letwin, and Jack McKivigan, On Strike For Respect, (updated edition: University of Illinois Press, 1995.)
In 1990, teaching and research assistants in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences decided to organize a union, GESO, and affiliated with the federation. There were several strikes in the 1990s, including two successive one month walkouts by Locals 35 and 34, respectively, in the spring semester of 1996. The 1996 strike was concerned primarily with the issue of subcontracting. During the strike, Local 35 organized nearly 300 casual workers into its bargaining unit, but Yale inserted a loophole into the contract which gave it the ability to subcontract work in any new or renovated buildings, and then promptly began a campaign to renovate nearly all of its major buildings.
In 1998 the federation struck a partnership with the SEIU to organize approximately 1800 unorganized workers at Yale-New Haven hospital, and the Federation became a multi-union, collaborative endeavor, The Federation of Hospital and University Employees.
In January 2002, the union's contract with the university expired. The union had agreed to a six-year, rather than a four-year contract during the previous negotiation cycle in order to avoid labor strife during the university's tercentennial celebrations. The university hired John Stepp of Restructuring Associates, Inc. to facilitate Interest-based bargaining in the hopes of avoiding the rancorous disputes of past contract cycles. In May 2002, Yale abruptly terminated Stepp's employment without previously notifying the federation. On September 25, 2002, 675 workers, students, and other members of the New Haven community were arrested in an act of mass civil disobedience.
Cornel West
Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America....
, Jesse Jackson
Jesse Jackson
Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. is an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to...
, John Sweeney
John Sweeney (labor leader)
John Joseph Sweeney was the president of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009.-Early years:Born in The Bronx, New York, Sweeney is the son of Joseph and Agnes , both Irish immigrants. The family moved to Yonkers in 1944, where Sweeney attended St. Barnabas Elementary School and graduated from Cardinal...
, Dennis Rivera
Dennis Rivera
Dennis Alexis Rivera Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican professional wrestler. He is one half of the first Undisputed Tag Team Champions in Puerto Rico, being recognized by both major promotions, the International Wrestling Association and World Wrestling Council, as champions during a single...
, John Wilhelm, and Andy Stern
Andy Stern
Andrew L. "Andy" Stern , is the former president of the 2.2 million-member Service Employees International Union , the fastest-growing union in the Americas. SEIU is the second largest union in the United States and Canada after the National Education Association.Stern was elected in 1996 to...
, as well as thousands of workers, thousands of members of the community who marched on the university on the strike's first day to demand equal access to jobs and the desegregation of the university's hiring structures, and hundreds of undergraduates, who staged a walkout on the strike's snowy fourth day and held classes in the street.
With negotiations effectively dead over the summer, the Federation struck again in late August, after a group of retirees occupied the university's investment office to demand to know the status and whereabouts of a university-administered pension fund. The strike was settled on September 18, 2003 after several days of negotiations mediated by New Haven Mayor John Destefano and a 10,000-strong labor march which shut down downtown New Haven five days earlier.
In April, 2005, GESO struck again for one week and continues to campaign, with the support of the rest of the Federation, for union recognition.
Other Yale Unions
Section(9)(b)(3) of the National Labor Relations ActNational Labor Relations Act
The National Labor Relations Act or Wagner Act , is a 1935 United States federal law that limits the means with which employers may react to workers in the private sector who create labor unions , engage in collective bargaining, and take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activity in...
--a part of the Taft-Hartley
Taft-Hartley Act
The Labor–Management Relations Act is a United States federal law that monitors the activities and power of labor unions. The act, still effective, was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. and became law by overriding U.S. President Harry S...
amendments--bans security guards from belonging to the same union as other workers of the same employer without the employer's permission. This prohibition extends beyond belonging to the same local or even the same international union; security officers cannot belong to any AFL-CIO
AFL-CIO
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, commonly AFL–CIO, is a national trade union center, the largest federation of unions in the United States, made up of 56 national and international unions, together representing more than 11 million workers...
affiliated union if other employees are members of an affiliate. The Yale administration has withheld its permission, so the university's police officers and security guards are not members of FHUE. Officers of the Yale University Police Department are members of the Yale Police Benevolent Association, which affiliated in 2005 with the Connecticut Organization for Public Safety Employees, an independent union. In 2010, Yale security officers were initially organized by AFSCME, an AFL-CIO affiliate union. Yale objected on section(9)(b)(3) grounds, and the National Labor Relations Board
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the United States government charged with conducting elections for labor union representation and with investigating and remedying unfair labor practices. Unfair labor practices may involve union-related situations or instances of...
sided with the employer. Instead, the security officers voted to join the International Union of Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America.