Some kid published an
op-ed in the YDN actually claiming that Alyssa Rosenberg, who knows more about the micro and macropolitics surrounding last spring's domestic partnership vote in the board of alders than anyone else on the face of the planet, didn't understand that in fact the real reason the vote failed was because heley failed to cram the room with enough Yalies. This is pure arrogance. When all the DP shit was going on, where the hell was this kid? Working for the office of New Haven and State Affairs like his chosen candidate? Hancock's arguing that instead of organizing aldermen to support DP, which both Healey and Rosenberg busted their asses doing, what Healey should have been doing was polarizing the issue, making it into the Yale-New Haven split, a sort of brazen colonial project, that it's opponents (and maybe Mike Morand) wanted it to become. This is deeply deeply porblematic, as is the way that Healey's opponents envision the Yale-New Haven relationship. The cooperation not conflict for which they demonstrated on July 7th outside city hall is very much a plantation model of town-gown interaction. And, in the words of the Rev. James Lawson, "Yale, we won't be your plantation anymore."
Making domestic partnership the axe with which they grind their own credibility demeans those for whom, this issue is in fact crucial. Claiming that what they want is a "partnership" renders the word meaningless, or else necessitates the addition of an adjective like "silent", or a phrase like "one-way" or "unequal." The claim that a right-wing puppet will succeed where Healey failed is laughable. And if any ward 1 alder is going to pass this resolution, it's Ben. (But only if Alyssa's organizing it.)
Interesting
interview in the Times today. Dr. Sheldon Krimsky, a senior research scientist, discusses the corporatization of science in the academy and its effects for the public which universities are supposed to serve. The times writes,
"In medical schools, dozens of faculty members may be earning significant sums as corporate consultants. At the same time, universities and their professors are plunging into the business world themselves, creating companies to sell products discovered in academic laboratories. "
Krimsky says:
"More generally, we see commercial effects in the evaluation of toxic chemicals such as lead, pesticides, dioxin. Also, the commercial interests are manifest in atmospheric science related to the global warming controversy, biotechnology and even in criminology when for-profit prisons were first introduced."
Yale has historically been and is now a leader in the kinds of processes that Krimsky's talking about -- and the consequences, both for those who do the research -- and for those who will suffer from its results, are really terrifying.
Meanwhile, the
YDN reports that the focus has now shifted to the hospital, where the 150 unionized workers in the dietary unit went back to work without a contract. The hospital's offer is unacceptable and hinges completely on merit-based raises -- a cost-cutting method of paying workers less in the name of "increased efficiency." Yet Katie Krauss is claiming that they're keeping "constracts unsigned as a leverage tool" so that the union can organize the rest of the 1800 workers at YNHH. This claim is laughable - workers gain nothing from not having a contract -- what the hospital gains, however, is one more means of intimidating the workers and trying to break both the dietary union and the larger union drive at the hospital. "Our next step," in the words of Bobby Proto, needs to be "Joe Zaccagnino's doorstep."
