I have two immediate responses to this article. One, the flippant, kind of sarcastic of the two, is that it's wonderful that yale has "lax hiring policies" for everyone except the 13 latino workers they promised jobs to when they signed a contract with Locals 34 and 35 back in September and who have now been blacklisted by New Haven's ruling class because of their refusal to cross Local 35's lines.

The second response is a discomfort with the discourses and technologies of "security" as applied to Yale workers and students. They were branded terrorists repeatedly during the last two strikes, particularly in the vile and contemptible attacks by some faculty members against their own graduate students, and this article - discursively associating workers with the drug trade and the implicit possibility of violence, follows in this tradition. It's part and parcel of a particularly pernicious project (massive alliteration, sorry) of policing and containing yale workers and the communities in which they live that seems a fundamental aspect of the way Yale articulates its relationship with the city's 120,000 residents.

I'm interested in and struck by the comments made by the two student dining hall workers who complain about the workers' ability to "talk back" to managerial discipline. Rather than emphasize the tremendous position of privilege that student workers tend to be in relative to non-student workers in the dining halls, which may have something to do with Gentry and Watford's sentiments, but which isn't a particularly productive discussion, i want to think about the way that the union becomes here not merely a discursive shield behind which "lazy workers" may supposedly hide, but a threat to students' well-being, allowing violent, drug-using New Haven to penetrate the protective bubble and shit where Yalies eat. It both scares me and says something very profound about the extent to which this is a hegemonic sentiment among students that the YDN would print this.  ¶ 12:41 PM