| A decade ago, blue-collar campus workers won a majority on the city council. Would an alliance with grad students dilute their power?  Illustration by Chantal Jahchan Yale University, with an endowment of forty billion dollars, is the largest landowner in New Haven, Connecticut, where one in four residents live at or below the federal poverty level. The juxtaposition is unmissable: the city is, as the labor leader and former resident Gwen Mills describes it, a “post-industrial manufacturing town with a multibillion-dollar education corporation plopped right into the middle of it.” And, because of its status as a nonprofit, Yale isn’t even required to pay taxes on all that property it owns. It would seem like a perfect setup for the kinds of intractable town-grown conflicts that roil many similar American cities. But, as E. Tammy Kim reports in a compelling new story, the situation in New Haven has been playing out differently, owing in large part to the unusual political success of Yale’s organized workers. For more than a decade, New Haven’s city council has been dominated by Local 35 and 34 of the large North American union UNITE HERE, which represent Yale’s mechanics, janitors, dining-hall workers, receptionists, librarians, and lab researchers. The council has been credited with pressuring Yale to give more back to the community, including making higher voluntary payments in lieu of taxes. Meanwhile, the union has been growing, and, this past year, achieved a major breakthrough when graduate-student teachers won their own union, Local 33. This expansion has strengthened the power of labor at Yale, but it brings new challenges as well. As Kim asks, “Could the Yale unions find enough common ground between graduate students and custodians and billing clerks to keep the experiment going?” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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