(NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT) - Yale’s three-week-old Student Protest Movement joined forces with the University’s Labor Unions, promising to push together for a more diverse campus that treats students and workers better and improves its Mental Health Care.

Organizers with Next Yale, the organizing group behind recent Student Protests over the campus’s racial climate, presented that united front at a Teach-In and Rally that filled both floors of the lecture at Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall on Prospect Street, then spilled onto Cross Campus.

The stated theme of the event was to oppose Yale’s endowment hoarding.

The argument: Yale could cover more Student Financial Aid, hire more Ethnic Studies Professors, bolster its Mental Health Services, and hire more New Haveners for Living Wage Jobs if it annually spent 8%, not 5%, of its $25.6 billion endowment (which was described variously during the event as a $23 billion and a $24 billion endowment).

The event featured a speech about that subject by a visiting expert from the University of San Diego.  The rest of the event focused on a broader argument: However you parse it, Yale can spend more to do right.

A corollary argument advanced at the event: Hundreds of Activist Students can help make that happen by working alongside UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35, which represent the University’s Pink- and -Blue-Collar Workers, and the Graduate Employees & Students Organization (GESO), which seeks to Unionize Grad Students.

Since UNITE HERE-backed Alders - some of whom spoke at or attended the event that was held earlier this week - control the Board of Alders, that effort has city-wide political implications as well.

In speeches before the crowd, representatives from each group sought to link their demands as part of a common agenda.

They also previewed some arguments that are poised to emerge in public view in 2016, the final year of UNITE HERE’s current contracts.

Conflicts about Outsourcing, Local Hiring and a shrinkage of Unionized Ranks have the potential of fraying Yale’s recent period of Labor Peace.

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