The Yale Daily News today picked up a story that the Register reported last week, and that Yale Insider picked up last week -- namely, that the hospital thinks it can run an effective anti-union campaign by filing a complaint against 1199 for extending picket pay to the dietary workers who struck last month. Katie Krauss told the press that the union was harassing scabs, improperly distributing funds, and what's more:

"We have been available to have a negotiation session, but the union has not indicated any interest or set up a time with us," hospital spokeswoman Katie Krauss said. "It's our sense frankly that the union is more or less holding these 140 employees hostage while working to expand union membership at the hospital."

I'm disgusted by what the hospital's doing. Yale-New Haven Hospital's idea of negotiations is proposing sham merit-pay increases while intimidating both unionized dietary workers - and the 1800 other workers at the hospital who've been fighting for the right to organize since 1998. These charges are groundless. Zaccagnino and company are trying to break both the dietary union and the organizing efforts of the other workers at the hospital -- as well as those of the hundreds of graduate researchers who work in the Yale Medical Center. Meanwhile, they've taken out an insane number of liens on poor people's property (so much for Yale's support for home ownership) due to the failure of people who are often Yale or YNHH employees to pay for health care, they've cultivated a colonial relationship with the city of which Dan Kruger is both but one example as well as an enthusiastic proponent and apologist, and they have further impacted the dynamics of land and labor in New Haven in numerous ways detailed by an upcoming CCNE report that i'm not going to blog until it's released. Suffice to say that this is bullshit, that we can't stand for this in our city or anywhere, and that YNHH and the university which more or less controls it can't continue this path to social death. We will resist, and we will construct new visions of citizenship and new ways of organizing society to triumph against the racist patronage politics and capitalist dystopias that constitute the net Yale's cast over this city.
  ¶ 11:42 PM