The Problem With GESO

To reiterate, I think Keith had it right. In fact, I don't consider his article to be a column so much as a straightforward report; the things he contends are simply fact (but check out the link and decide for yourself).

Back in the old days before Yale, when I was still at Dissent, we published a pamphlet on graduate student unionization, which I suppose I favored rather unthinkingly. I've reversed my views entirely, for one general reason and one local reason.

The general reason is that graduate students are not proletarians. The suggestion that Ph.Ds in waiting have a common class interest with lifelong wage-laborers, least of all Yale Ph.Ds in waiting, is an unfunny, borderline obscene joke. It is, moreover, a notion that can only hurt the cause of real workers.

The local reason has everything to do with GESO's management and tactics. As Keith amply reports, GESO's method of first resort is harrassment and intimidation. Their method of second resort is to stage rigged elections, and even there their rate of success is only 50%. This, I think, is the meat of Keith's article:

What Bysiewicz and giddy GESO supporters failed to mention at the Dec. 14 meeting was that the card count was hardly representative of the whole graduate student body. In an effort to exclude departments predominately opposed to unionization -- most notably those in the natural sciences -- GESO changed the eligibility requirements, denying the right to vote to hundreds who differed with the group's agenda. When asked about the exclusion of TAs in the natural sciences, GESO publicity contact Rachel Sulkes told me that those up on Science Hill had simply "defined themselves as outside our interests" -- a well-crafted PR term meaning that they disagreed with GESO and were therefore excluded.

Is this not the admission that ought to end the debate over GESO once and for all? If the only graduate students eligible to vote on unionization are those that already favor unionization, then GESO is quite obviously a fraud, a cross between a Communist Party Central Committee and an ill-managed triangle scheme.

UPDATE: The comment under the fold convinced me that there's something I need to clarify. When I said that GESO's conduct in rigging elections "ought to end the debate over GESO," I didn't mean that GESO's reliance on deceit and manipulation invalidated the right of graduate students to unionize (though I don't think graduate students do have a right to unionize, as per above). I meant that by taking a vote under the circumstances of dubious methodology (card balloting) and the intentional exclusion of grad students inclined to dissent (disallowing the vote from grad students in science), there simply isn't any rational argument left to be made that GESO is legitimately representative of the graduate student body. Yale would be doing a terrific injustice to grad students by legitimizing GESO as a valid interlocutor.