Eight Yale graduate students gathered under a large tent on Beinecke Plaza yesterday morning for the first day of an indefinite hunger strike designed to pressure Yale to begin contract negotiations with the graduate student union Local 33.

As the tent was assembled on Wednesday morning, another 16 graduate students were detained and charged with creating a public disturbance after they blocked the entrance to University President Peter Salovey’s annual Bulldog Days speech in Woolsey Hall. For the past month, Local 33 has been calling for Yale to begin contract negotiations, but so far, administrators have refused to come to the table as they continue to challenge the union in appeals to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C.

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And two labor law experts,  Duke Law professor Dan Bowling and former NLRB Chairman William Gould, said they could not think of another example of a union holding a hunger strike in order to force contract negotiations.

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Gould, who works as a professor at Stanford Law School, praised Local 33 for exposing the “dirty little secret” of labor law: the potential for union disputes to be dragged out for years on end.

“The law is good in terms of establishing a bill of rights for workers and a collective bargaining process in which labor and management can respect one another and engage in dialogue,” Gould said. “But it is very bad in terms of formulating an effective process and meaningful remedies for delay and loopholes.”