Yale University graduate students plan to walk out of classrooms and laboratories today in a labor strike that may be the first to involve a large number of students in the sciences.

Student labor movements at universities across the US have been gaining popularity, but few have involved students in the life and physical sciences. This may be in part because science students generally receive more substantial financial support than students in the humanities, but is also partly a result of science students supported by external grants having been exempted from eligibility to join unions in previous court rulings.

Few science students participated in Yale students' last major unionizing effort in 1995, when graduate student teaching assistants threatened to withhold the grades of their students.

This time, the weeklong strike will involve a sizeable portion of the university's science graduate students, say organizers with the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), whose chief demand is that the Yale administration recognize GESO as a union. Of more than 1300 Yale graduate student members of GESO, about 30 percent are in the sciences, said GESO chairwoman Anita Seth, a graduate student in the history department. The vote to strike, held Feb. 19, passed 482 to 141.

Unionization will benefit all Yale graduate students, not just those in the humanities, Seth told The Scientist. "This is not about money," she said, adding that nearly all Yale graduate students receive full stipends. Instead, GESO students want more control over decisions that affect their work, such as class size and allocation of university funds.

For students in the sciences, organizers say, the issues are the broader problems that have pervaded the sciences, such as the increasing number of years that researchers spend in low-paid post-doctoral positions, disparities in salary between physical scientists and biologists and the increasing corporate influence on university research and intellectual property rights.

Unionizing is a way for scientists to change the system, said Maris Zivarts, a graduate student researcher in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology department. "Scientists everywhere need to do whatever it takes to get a stronger voice, whether it is joining a union or another organization."

But not all Yale science students are on board with GESO. "Most of us agree with the goals but not with GESO's tactics," said John Kenneth Wickiser, a graduate student in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and a member of the Graduate Student Assembly, a group that advocates working with the administration. In online student forums, such as the anti-GESO Web site called "GASO," science students blasted GESO for its aggressive recruiting style, including visits from organizers while students are conducting experiments.

Science faculty have been drawn into the fray. GESO filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board against three professors whom GESO claims blocked union organizers from speaking with students in their labs. Yale has discouraged the professors from speaking to reporters until the charges are resolved.

The student strike is timed to coincide with a walkout by thousands of food service workers, custodians, secretaries and technicians at Yale and its teaching hospital over wages, pensions, training and job security. While labs may not be abandoned this week, the strike by workers of the Local 34 and 35 chapters of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees (HERE) International Union workers could disrupt some laboratory activities, including the care and feeding research animals.

Yale spokesperson Thomas Conroy, deputy director of public affairs, insisted no disruption will take place. "We have a strike contingency plan in place," said Conroy. "Faculty and staff will pick up the slack."