Daniel DiMaggio said he was impressed by the size of the strike.

“I wanted to show my support for the strike at Yale as a student and a labor activist, and I wanted to see exactly what was going on down there,” he said. “I wanted to see how big things were—and things were big. It seems like the whole school’s on strike.”

DiMaggio said he, unlike many Yale undergraduates, supports GESO just as much as the other workers.

“I support all of them equally,” he said. “If you feel the need to form a union to protect your rights, you should have that right.”

He said the strike would show union members at Harvard what labor solidarity could accomplish.

While he said he thought Harvard administrators would worry about the ramifications of the strike in New Haven, he was skeptical that the University would learn from the Yale strike .

“I’m sure that Harvard would have no qualms, despite the struggle at Yale denying [graduate students] their rights,” DiMaggio said. “I’m not trying to write [the strike] off—I just have very little faith that the Harvard administration will take note.”

Labor organizers said the protests would be larger today and tomorrow, and picketers would converge on the heart of campus rather than spreading out to a variety of posts.

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney is scheduled to address the protesters today, and former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 will speak tomorrow.

On Thursday, many students plan to join the action.

Sophomore Zoe Palitz, a student organizer who was handing out flyers, said over 500 students had signed up to walk out of classes at 11 a.m. tomorrow to do teach-ins.

Union officials also said that buses of students were scheduled to come from Columbia University and New York University tomorrow to join the strikers.

The Administration’s View

Smith said Yale administrators refused to discuss the unions’ grievances. She dismissed the university’s current offer as inadequate.

“Yale has not so far dealt with us fairly on any of our important issues,” Smith said. “There is no good contract on the table right now.”