Graduate student teachers at Yale University have been on a hunger strike for three weeks. Their aim is to pressure Yale officials to recognize their union.

Eight students began to fast on April 25. After going 14 days without eating or drinking, the last three of the original hunger strikers traded places with fellow union members on the advice of their doctors on May 15.

“The graduate student teachers need a union,” said Sarah Arveson, a second-year graduate student. “We’re currently subjected to rules made by an opaque body that we have no say in.”

Graduate students in eight departments at Yale voted to join Local 33 of the national union Unite Here to obtain better wages and health care, as well as to access a legal grievance process. But Yale has refused to acknowledge the union. 

The National Labor Relations Board previously ruled that graduate student teachers at private universities are employees and, therefore, have a right to collective bargaining. The students claim the university is stalling until President Trump can appoint management-friendly representatives to the labor board to reverse that ruling.

The dispute has implications beyond Yale’s campus. About 70 percent of faculty members in higher education are considered “contingent,” which means they work on contract, without tenure or benefits.

The New York Times, May 9
In These Times, May 12
ABC News 8, May 16