For the first months of its existence, the Harvard Graduate Student Union, HGSU-UAW, had a simple goal in mind. “What do we want?” members of the union members chanted, placards raised high around the John Harvard statue. “A contract! When do we want it? Now!” On July 1, 2020, “Now” finally arrived, and the new contract, in which the Harvard administration recognized HGSU-UAW as “the exclusive bargaining representative” for graduate students, came into force.
Once HGSU achieved this goal, one might have expected them to fade into the background of Harvard’s landscape. However, their work was just beginning. As training materials for HGSU stewards state, “The contract is not a static document. It evolves through application, enforcement, interpretation, and negotiation.” HGSU may have successfully bargained on behalf of its workers as a group, but now it had to represent them, one by one, in individual cases.
Article 6 of the current HGSU-UAW contract defines a multi-step grievance procedure. First, those with the grievance “are encouraged, but not required, to discuss the problems with the immediate supervisor or faculty member to whom they report.” Should this fail, the union may file a formal Step One grievance, which could escalate to Step Two, involving administrators at the level of school Deans. Step Three, should it prove necessary, is independent arbitration. To help individuals navigate this process, HGSU-UAW inaugurated the Contract Enforcement and Education Committee, otherwise known as CEEC.
The idea of CEEC was popular among the union from its first meeting. “The previous bargaining committee sent out an email to people who were active and who were supportive of the union causes, and they notified us about this idea to start this grievance committee,” Boryana Hadzhiyska, a third-year Ph.D. student in astrophysics and one of CEEC’s three co-chairs, told the Independent. “We had about 70 people show up to the initial meeting, just discussing what this grievance committee would be like [and] gauging interest.” At this meeting, Hadzhiyska, Hadzhiyska, along with Maya Anjur-Dietrich, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in applied physics and HGSU’s sergeant-at-arms, and Lewis Picard, a third-year Ph.D. student also in applied physics, volunteered as co-chairs. As the committee took shape over the following months, the process to join became more formalized, and grievance officers now undergo a training process that involves both theory and supervised practice. Such training has become necessary as the group’s responsibilities have swelled: by late February, the committee had received over 170 requests for help.
Of these requests, Hadzhiyska said that they “have resolved a large majority […] in favor of the student workers.” They have had particular success with compensation cases: Anjur-Dietrich could not recall one they have lost, out of the over thirty they accepted. She attributed this to the contract’s precise language regarding compensation: “[Article 20] is laid out particularly clearly, in such a way that there’s little room for misinterpretation, unless it’s willful misinterpretation.” In general, Hadzhiyska said, “The parts of the contract that have been laid out very clearly have been more easy to win than in cases where there is more room for interpretation and the administrators themselves are unsure.” Encouragingly, the most straightforward cases are often the most easily resolved.
Hadzhiyska’s comment about administrative misunderstanding touches on a surprising truth about CEEC’s work: the vast majority of it is done informally, in the “encouraged, but not required” phase before Step One. CEEC members refer to this as “Step Zero,” and so far only five cases have had to move beyond it. Hadzhiyska said she was “quite astonished to see how many administrators […] have been willing to engage with us and try to genuinely help the student worker, and have just needed this nudge from us.”
While she did acknowledge that “obviously there are outliers to this,” and Anjur-Dietrich warned that “it really depends on the department,” CEEC has found many Harvard staff to be more confused than malicious. Part of this is because, as Hadzhiyska claimed, “[Departmental administrators] are not really receiving any help from the administrators above them, the top Harvard administrators, [so] they might be a little bit more confused, especially if the contract is not very clear.” She gave the example of appointment letters, documents formally laying out items such as responsibilities and pay, which all graduate workers must receive according to the contract. “Administrators are still struggling with creating these because there is no structure coming from above that helps them with templates and so on,” said Hadzhiyska. Having a contract for graduate students is new for everybody, not just HGSU, so the “Education” role of CEEC is often more powerful than the “Enforcement.”
When Step Zero fails, the outcomes are different. “In terms of filing the formal agreements procedure, the atmosphere is decidedly chillier,” said Anjur-Dietrich. “We have not filed a single Step One that has been resolved in any way other than going all the way to arbitration.” (Step Three involves arbitration, but also pre-arbitration procedures and preparation, and one grievance has been resolved in that stage. It is still accurate to say that all resolved Step One grievances have at some point required the beginning of an arbitration process.) Part of this may be due to HGSU’s reluctance to get involved in formal grievances over trivial matters. Anjur-Dietrich said that “Filing a Step One grievance is seen as something that we take quite seriously,” so it would make sense that only the most significant issues enter the grievance process at all. This is the system working as designed: most things are handled quickly and easily, but formal procedures are available for the worst disagreements.
Certain grievances are serious yet do not involve Step One: those which the contract does not touch. The current contract, for example, lacks harassment and discrimination protections. CEEC’s job is much more difficult in these cases, as the committee has no automatic power. “I guess that [Step] Zero, we can always follow,” said Hadzhiyska, “but we can’t follow One, Two, and Three.” The solution is to get involved, not as a union committee bringing a union grievance, but as a group that happens to be composed of union members. Hadzhiyska explained, “We can say, well, ‘Would you like us to serve as your representatives?’ And if that person agrees to that, then we have the legal right to sit in on any meetings with the grievant […] to send out emails on their behalf, or to correspond in some way with the University, of course after having gained approval from that student worker.” Neither Hadzhiyska nor Anjur-Dietrich was particularly happy about this solution, but they seemed to feel that it was better than reaching no solution at all. Certainly, they and the rest of CEEC do not think that the contract must strictly limit their roles when helping student workers.
CEEC’s steward training materials also emphasized that “Even non-grievable issues are really important,” but in this case, it was for a different reason: they show “what we need to fight for.” After eight months of working under last year’s contract, HGSU-UAW is ready to begin negotiating for its next one, and CEEC’s grievance data will be crucial in this process. “What we can learn from this year is both what are the strengths and what are weaknesses of this contract,” explained Anjur-Dietrich. “We’ve already identified a lot of areas where we have grievances come in, but we don’t have the contractual basis to protect people.” HGSU-UAW can pinpoint “what rights should be strengthened, what language should we change, what language shouldn’t change because we’ve been able to successfully grieve and win those cases, and what isn’t in the contract that, for example, has come up in a remote working environment, which the bargaining committee of a year and a half ago couldn’t have imagined,” said Anjur-Dietrich. “All of these things change the way that we think about what the contract is.” In the end, CEEC and the contract work hand-in-hand, and that is not a bad thing: the ultimate grievance procedure, after all, is to demand to rewrite the laws under which you grieve.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) would like his voice to be heard.