Bad marks for Yale's labor policies.

During the spring semester at Yale University, students usually tuck in their shirts, spice up their resumes, and head off to interviews at elite corporations and graduate schools. This year, however, the eager Ivy Leaguers may be missing an important accessory - their transcripts.

Graduate-student teachers, who have been struggling to organize a labor union at Yale since 1990, voted on December 7 to withhold their students' fall grades until university officials agree to negotiate with them in good faith. And because the Graduate Employee and Student Organization (GESO), which represents 1,050 graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, has formed a strategic alliance with Yale's two other labor unions - hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 34, which represents 2,500 clerical and technical workers, and Local 35, which represents 1,250 service and maintenance workers - it may be in an even stronger position when classes resume.

Graduate students spend more time teaching in the classroom than full-time faculty, yet they have no negotiated rights as employees. Their wages remain low, while their health-insurance costs have risen 123 percent in the past five years.

Faced with Yale's longstanding refusal to create a more equitable relationship, graduate students voted 4-to-1 last spring to form a union. And last fall, they joined Locals 34 and 35 in an escalating series of demonstrations. Already there are more than a dozen graduate-teachers' unions at universities nationwide, but GESO would be the first at a private school.

The grade strike is GESO's most powerful tactic yet. "It was a difficult step," GESO chair Robin Brown explains. "We don't like to take action that affects students. But Yale has left us no other recourse. Our request is only for dialogue, to have some say over the shape of our lives here."

For its part, the administration has dug in its heels. Dean Richard Brodhead says the grade strike is "a morally wretched thing to do." And associate vice president Peter Vallone declares, "The University has been clear from day one. [1t] won't recognize GESO and won't negotiate with GESO."

Accordingly, Yale is pulling out all the stops to crush the strike. Despite more than 400 letters from professors around the country urging Yale not to retaliate against students for their political activities, the administration is threatening teaching assistants with a spring lockout and even expulsion. Some professors have promised to blacklist their students or refuse to write them letters of recommendation. And Yale has refused to issue a clear policy on labor activism and academic freedom. At least four graduate students face disciplinary charges.

Delegates at the Modern Language Association, the nation's largest academic conference, voted overwhelmingly to censure Yale for "failing to protect the rights of Yale's graduate teaching staff to participate in union activities, including job actions, without fear of reprisals against their academic careers."

The conflict highlights fundamental changes in higher education. Like other universities, Yale has responded to leaner economic times by restructuring in the image of a corporation. Despite earning a record 15.7 percent profit on its $4 billion endowment last year, Yale is demanding lower wages for new workers and benefit cuts in its contract negotiations with Locals 34 and 35. Academically, Yale has cut expensive full-time faculty positions and left graduate students to pick up the slack.

Yale's labor policies have a profound impact on one of the poorest cities in the United States. Nearly one in seven New Haven workers receives a check from Yale. The solidarity among these workers with the graduate students is ground-breaking.

Given Yale's reaction thus far, there is the prospect of a protracted strike in the spring. But as Yale labor historian David Montgomery points out, there is another way. If Yale has the will, these disputes can be "resolved by serious discussion around the negotiating table," he says. On the other hand, "nothing would be worse... than for the administration to approach these negotiations with the attitude that every other business concern is grinding down its workers nowadays, so Yale should join the pack. That way lies chaos." For more information, contact the Federation of University Employees, 425 College St., New Haven, CT 06511; [phone].