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Hospital Must Pay in Labor Dispute
January/February 2008
by Carole Bass ’83, ’97MSL
An arbitrator has ordered Yale–New Haven Hospital to pay $4.5 million in fines for breaking an agreement with the union that is trying to organize workers there. But her decision left unresolved the dispute over if and how a union will be established
at the hospital.
The controversy comes at a sensitive time for Yale University, which is trying to improve its historically rocky relationship with its own unions. The hospital is separate from the university, with its own CEO, administration, and board. But the relationship between the two is close: Yale–New Haven is the teaching hospital for the university’s medical school, and Yale representatives sit on
the hospital’s board.
The decision by independent arbitrator Margaret Kern, announced in late October, found that the hospital had systematically violated a 2006 agreement that set ground rules for a union election. (The election was canceled in December 2006, after the violations first came to light.) Kern, whom the two sides had hired to oversee the agreement, found that Yale–New Haven had violated the agreement and labor law by holding nearly 100 mandatory employee meetings, at which managers falsely claimed that union representation would spell loss of overtime, wage differentials, and benefits. She ordered the hospital to pay $2.2 million to the individual employees who were, in Kern’s word, “victimized” by the aborted election; and $2.3 million to the union, District 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, to reimburse it for election costs. The hospital has made the payments to the employees but is reviewing 1199’s costs
before paying the union.
Kern’s 47-page decision does not solve the underlying conflict over unionization. The hospital has pushed for a secret-ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. The union had previously called for a “card count” decision, in which union organizers meet with employees over time and collect their signatures; like many unions, it argues that the NLRB process allows management to manipulate and intimidate employees, and that a secret ballot does not
mitigate that problem.
In the 2006 agreement, the union had consented to a secret-ballot election, with some additional protective provisions. But after the election was canceled, 1199 asked Kern to order the hospital to recognize the union. Kern ruled that she
has no such authority.
“The most important point” of the ruling, says hospital spokesman Vin Petrini, “is
that it preserves our employees' right to vote on this issue.”
In a highly unusual move, hospital management has petitioned the NLRB for an election. Bill Meyerson, a spokesman for 1199, calls the request a “sham.” “These petitions are filed when the union claims to have a majority,” he says.
“We don’t claim to have a majority. We did; they destroyed it.”
Meanwhile, Yale University and its own unions, locals 34 and 35, have been working on rapprochement since the resolution of the last contract dispute in fall 2003. Joint labor-management committees have been formed in work units to find “best practices” for increasing productivity and employee satisfaction. “We’re working very hard to build a new and improved union-management partnership,” says Laura Smith, president of Local 34 of the Federation of University Employees.
The parties have two years until the current contract expires in January 2010.
The hospital situation does not help, Smith adds. “It’s difficult to continue to say everything’s much improved here when these awful violations have taken
place” at the hospital. “It makes that trust much harder to build.”
Yale president Richard C. Levin says, “We’re working very well with locals 34 and 35,” but he concedes that “the situation across town creates some bumps in the road.” Levin, a hospital trustee, has publicly expressed dismay about the illegal mandatory meetings, the only trustee to do so. Yale currently has five seats on the hospital’s 20-member board. Most of the other trustees are regional business leaders, such as the heads of NewAlliance Bank and
Connecticut Energy Corporation.
In April, Levin met with leaders of locals 34 and 35 to discuss the hospital labor situation—the first time a Yale president has sat down with the union’s full executive boards. The unions asked Levin to “take a pro-union stand” on the hospital board, Smith says. (District 1199 turned up the heat again last fall, taking out full-page ads in the New Haven Register and the New York Times with the headline “Yale’s hospital spent millions to destroy our union. They failed.”) Levin says that his response was then, and is now, that he favors “a free and fair election” at the
hospital.
Drama student dies in theater accident
by Jessica Marsden '08
A drama student was killed on November 18 while preparing for a Yale Repertory Theatre production of Tartuffe. Pierre-Andre Salim, 26, was helping to unload sets from the back of a truck when a stack of particle board fell and pinned him against the truck’s wall. Although Salim was wearing a hard hat, the weight was so
great that he suffered massive head injuries.
Investigators from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration said that the way the particle board was stacked inside the truck contributed to the accident. In December, OSHA recommended that Yale give drama students specific
training and supervision in unloading heavy props.
Salim, a student in the School of Drama’s technical design and production program, was participating in a required production assignment when the accident occurred. OSHA officials say that because Salim was working in his capacity as a student, not as an employee, OSHA does not have the authority to assess penalties in the
case.
After Salim’s death, drama school dean James Bundy '95MFA apologized “for any factors that could have contributed to this tragedy.” In response to the accident, the provost’s and general counsel’s offices have launched an inquiry into safety
practices across campus.
Salim, who was born in France and grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, graduated in 2002 from the National University of Singapore. After college, he worked as a production and stage manager for several theater companies in Singapore before
enrolling at Yale in 2006.
As one of only 202 drama students, Salim had been well known in the drama school, and the school postponed the opening of Tartuffe for a week and held a memorial
service, vigil, and other gatherings for faculty, students, and Salim’s family.
“He was—is—the kind of person everybody seems to know. So it cut very deeply,” said Bill Reynolds, the drama school’s operations manager. The school has
established a full scholarship in Salim’s honor.
Spamalot
by Jessica
Marsden ’08
Yale’s info tech office, like everybody else with an Internet connection, is locked in a never-ending battle with “Wilfredo Baxter,” “Imogene Feliciano,” and all the other pseudonymous purveyors of junk e-mail. Last October, almost 88 percent of e-mail addressed to Yale accounts was rejected as spam.
Information Technology Services rejects messages from known spammers and scans the rest for viruses and for phrases characteristic of spam. (But scanners have their blind spots. Yale account holders still receive frequent messages advertising che*ap Vi*agra.) As quickly as ITS can install new spam-blockers, spammers adapt. In summer 2007, a major species of spam relied on PDF files to evade the scanners. But now that technology has been developed to screen it out, PDF spam is almost
nonexistent.
Yale enjoyed a brief dip in volume in the summer of 2006, when ITS stopped accepting “fuzzy matches” (in which the address doesn’t quite match a real Yale e-mail
address). But mostly, it just keeps going up.
Students wary of college expansion
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Is the proposed construction of two new residential colleges at Yale—and a 12 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment—a foregone conclusion? The Yale administration has taken pains to emphasize that the decision will not be made until February, when the Yale Corporation hears the reports of two committees charged with considering the effects of such a move on academics and student life. But the university has listed the cost of the colleges—some $545 million—in its budget for next year. And planning for other projects, such as the renovation of Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges, appears to incorporate assumptions
that the new colleges will be built.
At student forums this fall and in the campus media, many students have expressed doubts about the expansion plan and skepticism that their concerns would have an impact on the decision. Forty-eight percent of undergraduates polled by the Yale Daily News in November opposed the plan; 23 percent favored it and 29 percent were undecided. Some students fear that adding another 650 new students to the current 5,275 will make Yale a less intimate place. Others say that the proposed location—on Prospect Street between the Grove Street Cemetery and Ingalls Rink—is too far from the other
colleges and the center of campus.
Administrators speaking at one of the student forums, on November 1 in Morse College, talked about ways Yale could reduce the geographic problems: including a third building on the site to house classrooms or student activity space, thus drawing undergraduates to the area from other parts of campus); enhancing shuttle bus service; and adding new, more active uses to the buildings along
Prospect Street across from the cemetery.
President Levin says the student objections don’t surprise him. “They understandably are deeply concerned that nothing dilute the quality of the Yale College experience, and I think that we are listening deeply to that concern,” he says. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the alumni population, there’s considerable enthusiasm among the faculty, and there’s understandable concern among the
students, and we’re listening to all of this.”
The Corporation has made one decision about the colleges: if they are built, Levin
says, they will not be named for their donors.
Yale’s country house gets a makeover
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
When Margaret Powell became librarian of Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library in 2000, one of the first calls she took was from one of the library’s neighbors, who informed her, “Your poison ivy is strangling my rhododendron.” Says Powell: “That’s when I knew I was a long way from Sterling Library.”
In fact, she was some 40 miles north, on a 14-acre estate in the Hartford suburb of Farmington, where Yale has since 1980 run one of its must unusual outposts. There, scholar Wilmarth Lewis '18 and his wife, Annie Burr Lewis, made their home and built a collection of books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, and furniture, all centered on the Lewises' near-obsessive interest in the eighteenth-century English literary figure Horace Walpole. When Mr. Lewis died
in 1979, both the property and the collection were left to Yale.
One of the two houses on the site was renovated in 2001 to provide lodging for visiting scholars. But the eighteenth-century main house, where the Lewises had lived, had proved inadequate to both house the collections and make them accessible to scholars. So, in 2006, the library closed for a yearlong renovation project, in which most of the collection was moved to a new
building. The renovated library was rededicated last September.
Architect Mark Simon '72MArch of Centerbrook Architects says the new building had to be fairly large in order to provide archival storage space for the collection and a new reading room for scholars. Simon’s firm designed the new structure to
resemble a barn, in keeping with New England rural tradition.
The renovation will make it easier for scholars to take advantage of the Lewises' collection, which sheds light not just on Walpole but on the literary, artistic, and political worlds of eighteenth-century England. “Walpole knew everybody,” says Powell. “He carried on long correspondences with people, sometimes up to 40 years. And he was a gossip, so you find out all sorts of
things.”
Powell says that she is heartened by the university’s commitment to a place that has often been out of sight and out of mind over the last 25 years. “For a long time this was a backwater,” she says. “To have this attention given to the
library is wonderfully validating.”
An online eye on the environment
by Robert McGuire
When Roger Cohn '73 went to the Philadelphia Inquirer early in his career, it wasn’t easy to convince his editor to let him cover stories about environmental issues. “It was the post-Earth Day seventies,” he says, “and it was considered kind of a fad that was going to pass. Real 'newsmen' didn’t take it seriously. So I had
to kind of push for the beat.”
Cohn, who was recently hired by Yale to launch an online environmental magazine, has spent his career covering environmental issues, including notable stints as executive editor of Audubon magazine and editor of Mother Jones (which won a National Magazine Award for general excellence during his tenure). Cohn says he’s seen a lot of changes in environmental reporting in the meantime. “Reporters who cover [the environment] now have more training in science than reporters who jumped into it in the '70s and '80s,” he says. “I think there’s a growing sense that it’s an important beat. In the last year or so, if you look at front pages, the
environment has a whole other place.”
That growing public interest is part of what inspired Gus Speth '64, '69LLB, dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, to found the magazine, which has the working title Yale Environment Online. The magazine will mix in-depth investigative reporting, opinion pieces, and multimedia features about global
warming, wildlife, energy policy, and green technologies.
“We have enough news reports,” says Speth. “But we still lack a forum for opinion, analysis, and commentary that this rapidly enlarging community can gravitate toward. People like me for years have been sending op-ed pieces to the New York Times to no avail. I think there’s a big market out there for a space where people really
can communicate on these issues.”
Cohn, the magazine’s executive editor, says it will occupy a niche unfilled by green lifestyle publications that offer “ten ways to reduce your carbon footprint,” websites limited to the agenda of environmental activists, and science journals that are too technical for the lay reader. Cohn and Speth say their international list of contributors and coverage of issues around the world are
an important part of what will make the magazine unique.
Yale Environment Online will target general readers who are deeply interested in the environment, which Cohn says is starting to become “a pretty large audience. That’s not just policy wonks—though I do hope policy wonks will read us. Because the kinds of stories we’ll bring will be compelling, we’ll have a much broader audience than
a policy journal.”
The real measure of the magazine’s success, says Timothy B. Wheeler, president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, will be “just how essential it becomes in one’s daily consumption of opinion. Will it be a must-read? It could be very useful, especially with its international point of view. We’re eager to
see how it adds to the community knowledge and dialogue.”  |
