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Reporting a story you won’t find in the New York Times, Yale Daily News columnist James Kirchick writes a harrowing account of a university employee who is exercising her right not to join the service workers’ strike we have been following. Kirchick notes that she is not exactly alone in continuing to work and adds a dose of reality to the purported strike issues: “Despite what the unions would have you believe, most of Yale’s work force is not on strike, a puzzling reality seeing that unions are supposed to represent their membership. I spoke to some of these nonstriking workers, and they expressed their indignation over the demands and tactics that the unions are employing.
“On the heated issue of pensions, one nonstriking member of Local 34, Brenda (a pseudonym), raved to me about how Yale’s pension program is ‘free money — in the real world, not the Yale world, there’s no such thing as pensions anymore.’ That is, most workers in America, if they are lucky enough to even have a pension plan, pay into it with their own earnings, like a 401k. Cindy (another pseudonym), also of Local 34, aptly remarked, ‘It’s almost like [the unions] think that Yale is Santa Claus and they’re a bunch of little brats.'”
Kirchick further discusses the national political strategy behind the Yale strike, an element of the events that he alone reported in an earlier column and continues in today’s column. He concludes: “Union leaders lied to us. They said that we were not the targets of this strike, but they have made us combatants in their war against Yale. It is long past time for us to fight back by standing with the administration and making it clear to John Wilhelm and his ilk that their political games will not stop us from going to class and getting our work done.
“As Brenda said, if this were the real world, Yale’s striking workers would be thankful for the generous offer they are receiving and get back to work. But this is not the real world. Welcome to Planet Yale.”

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