Eight days into the graduate students’ strike, Harvard’s administration made perhaps its most disturbing and potentially far-reaching move: it attempted to make employment conditional on non-participation in strike action. This procedure, by which the employer predicates employment on a worker’s non-participation in union membership or strike action, has a long history. It is called a “yellow dog contract” because only a scared worker (a “yellow dog”) will sign one, and fear is what it aims to induce. Harvard is attacking freedoms so basic that we have forgotten how hard-won they were. The defeat of the yellow dog contract was one of a handful of moments in the twentieth century that marked the arrival of a more fully realized democracy in modern America—alongside women’s suffrage and civil rights and voting rights legislation.
Source : How Harvard Aims to Muzzle Unions
