Yale clerical and technical workers unions packed Beinecke Plaza with signs reading “Maurie, Don’t Give Up On Labor Peace” and “One Job Should Be Enough”, Thursday in their largest rally since the union's founding in 1983.
The unions, which have been in contract negotiations with Yale for 14 months, gathered to demand a contract that includes inflation-adjusted benefits and guardrails on the University’s deployment of AI job tools.
Yale’s unions last went on a labor strike in 2003, which bargaining officer for Locals 33, 34, and 35, Bob Proto, said the University should prepare for if it continues to leave unions in a stalemate over contract negotiations.
“Maurie McInnis’ office is right there,” said Proto, pointing across the intersection to Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall. “I have a question to ask her: Is this what you want this campus to look like?”
Proto continued the rallying cry for more benefits for Yale’s newest labor union, Local 33, which serves postdoctoral educators and researchers: “We are not settling until the postdocs get the wages and benefits that they deserve.”
The rally arrives in conjunction with the release of Local 34 and 35’s “Artificial University” report; a detailed chronology of Yale’s implementation of AI job tools in white-collar clerical and technical work that the union claims threatens the workforces that are the bedrock of the University.
The report claims the University did not give clerical and technical workers 90-day notice of its implementation of Clarity AI, a job tool the University invested $150 million in to make administrative and library work less time-consuming.
The report claims the hasty deployment is a violation of Section 12 of Yale’s Memorandum of Agreement with the unions, which governs technological change for departments that use unionized labor.
The report includes testimony from several white-collar workers at Yale, the vast majority of whom are women.
Over the past year, the Yale library has deployed several AI models that assist with citations, cataloguing, and navigation of the library’s resources. Yale Library Frontline Services Assistant, Amber Suess, says these AI technologies “directly compete with the work that I do at the library” and reduce the need for her labor and expertise.
Other Yale workers cite unforeseen AI deployment as making their jobs more difficult as opposed to more efficient.
Jennifer Ongley, who is an assistant to the chair of the physics department at Yale, said AI tools her department was encouraged to adopt wrote “word salad” emails and often doubled the amount of work clerical workers were tasked with.
Karen Kryptopolus, a senior administrative assistant at the University, echoed the reports’ concerns in her address to the crowd: Artificial intelligence “doesn’t know our people, because it’s not a person,” said Kryptopolus. “Instead of adding capacity,” she argued, “it’s leaving us short-staffed with more work to do.”
Other unionized workers cite mandatory AI training, pressure to adopt tools that were presented as optional during piloting stages, and an overall decrease in the creative or free-form aspects of their jobs.
Speakers also grappled with the cost of living.
Brian Faulks, a 16-year-old high school student from New Haven, whose mother is a custodian at Yale’s Peabody Museum, said Yale’s wages and labor climate were not enough to support his household.
“I have to look at the strongest person I know look defeated over a light bill,” Faulks said of his mother.
Local 34 is a predominantly female union, with roughly 78% of members self-identifying as female. The union emerged from the equal work, equal pay debates of the 1980s. The current contract is set to be re-settled in January 2027.
