The Harvard Graduate Student Union Strikes For Increased Pay and Protections

On Tuesday, April 21, members of the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers went on strike against the Harvard administration after 14 months of bargaining for a new contract. For the past 72 hours, union members—which include graduate and undergraduate student workers at Harvard, such as Teaching Fellows, Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants, and Course Assistants—have stopped performing their professional responsibilities to picket across the University’s campuses. Undergraduate students have been left in limbo as courses are cancelled and campus buildings are blocked.

The HGSU-UAW bargaining committee consists of around 3,900 student workers who hold approximately 4,900 positions across the University. Harvard has over 6,000 unionized employees who are represented across clerical, technical, academic, and service operations. Currently, the University has formal agreements with seven unions, of which the Area Trades Council, Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union also have contracts that expire in 2026. The prior HGSU-UAW Agreement lasted until June 30, 2025. 

HGSU-UAW began talks to develop the terms of a new contract in Feb. 2025. The Union and University have regularly met since March 2025. Over the course of 23 bargaining sessions, HGSU-UAW and the University have reached consensus only on workspace and materials, as well as vacation or personal time. 23 articles are still outstanding, and one regarding a lab transition program has been withdrawn.

Frustration over the lack of progress in these discussions contributed to the recent escalation. “A strike is a last resort. I am willing to go on strike, but I certainly do not want to go on strike,” bargaining committee member and Ph.D. candidate Denish Jaswal said to the “Harvard Independent.” “After 14 months at the bargaining table, there are still some articles that the university has never responded to. There are many articles on our key demands that I laid out that Harvard has not agreed to make progress on. And so, I think that we have tried everything else, short of a strike, to get them to move.” 

Director of Harvard’s Office of Labor and Employee Relations Brian Magner refrained from commenting on behalf of Harvard in a correspondence with the “Harvard Independent.”

The Backdrop

Four days before the strike began, Provost and the Dane Professor of Law John Manning ’82 and Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick ’90 addressed HGSU-UAW and its demands in an email to University students and faculty. “The University remains committed to negotiating in good faith and reaching an agreement with HGSU-UAW-UAW,” the April 17 message wrote. They continued to discuss HGSU-UAW requests for additional monetary compensation, worker benefits, and harassment and discrimination protections, determining that each was unfeasible for Harvard to comply with.

HGSU-UAW President Sara Speller and Vice President Sudipta Saha responded on behalf of the Union. “Here’s the bottom line: Harvard’s email portrays our proposals as unreasonable special protections. We are asking for equity: equity of pay between TF work and RA work, equity for those asking for protections from discrimination and harassment, equitable protections for non-citizen and disabled student workers, and an equitable union security structure that mirrors every other union contract on this campus,” Speller and Saha wrote.

“The strike is not inevitable—we encourage the University to come to the table and work through these issues together. We remain available to meet, any time of day or night,” they continued. “But in the coming days, and if a strike is to begin, we encourage you to speak to the workers about their experiences.”

HGSU-UAW has classified their main claims into four categories: compensation, non-discrimination and harassment procedures, non-citizen student worker protections, and Union dues. 

Compensation

HGSU-UAW is asking for a salary that accounts for the high cost of living in Boston and Cambridge, which has been estimated to be approximately $70,000 for an adult without children. Currently, TFs are paid on average $26,300 over 10 months for 20 hours of work a week, and Research Assistants are paid $40,830. Ph.D. students on research salaries receive a $50,000 stipend. Guaranteed funding for Ph.D. students in the Humanities and Social Sciences lasts only five years. 

The Union requests that the University raise TF pay to around $45,000 during the academic year—an adjustment which the Union feels is necessary to, according to Speller and Saha, “correct a Harvard-specific workaround that keeps TF wages low and makes it difficult for upper G-level graduate workers to stay afloat.” The Union also wants its wages to continually increase in proportion to inflation. To support their demands, the Union cited peer institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, where student workers make up to $60,293 and $58,460, respectively. 

Some union workers find the gap between Harvard and these other universities shameful. “Harvard is the most well-endowed institution in the world. It can lift, it can set the highest standard for working conditions in this entire world, if it wanted to, and it is actively choosing not to,” Jaswal said.

The University responded with a proposed 10% increase to all salaried appointment rates over four years. “This is in line with compensation offers in other recent labor negotiations. HGSU-UAW, however, has proposed a 74% increase in the minimum rate for TFs and a 22% increase for salaried research assistants,” Manning and Weenick wrote in their April 17 letter. They continued to clarify that, in addition to compensation, Ph.D. student workers receive benefits to cover tuition, health insurance, and living expenses, which total at least $425,000 over a minimum of five years.

Ph.D. candidate and GOV 1295 TF Jessica Van Meir clarified these numbers based on her experience, which has been compounded by high University housing expenses. “One of my best friends last year moved to Ohio because Harvard raised her rent by 40% from one year to the next,” she said. “She simply could not afford to live here anymore on a TF salary, and she was working more than two sections a semester.” 

During one of the bargaining sessions, the University’s CFO gave a presentation breaking down Harvard’s finances. Union members were left confused by the conveyed lack of liquidity. “I think the biggest question was, you have a $57 billion endowment, why can’t that be used to fund our proposals?” Jaswal said. “I think their answer was that they value the endowment growing in perpetuity over paying their workers a living wage. So the answer was not that they can’t afford it. The answer was, this is not their priority right now.”

Non-discrimination

HGSU-UAW’s second key demand asks for recourse regarding harassment and discrimination processes.

In 2023, the University established the Harvard University Non-Discrimination Policy for all University affiliates. The policy designates the institution in charge of approving or denying all harassment and discrimination claims. 

According to Speller and Saha, one in five student workers experiences harassment, discrimination, or bullying during their time at Harvard. “We have had multiple workers come to the table to testify about their experiences being sexually harassed and assaulted in their place of work, only for the University to insist that the very processes which have failed our members are the ones that we must accept in the name of ‘equal treatment,’” the pair wrote. “Some workers have even, in the midst of crisis, been placed on involuntary leave, depriving them of pay and healthcare when they need it the most. Their experiences have fallen on deaf ears.”

“The HGSU-UAW proposal would conflict not only with federal regulations for Title IX complaints, but also with the University’s policy that members of our community should have access to the same procedures,” Manning and Weenick responded.

“Over the course of my Ph.D., I’ve personally known about half a dozen people who have been assaulted, harassed,” Ph.D. candidate Rachel Petherbridge said to the “Harvard Independent.” “All these people have one thing in common, which is that they’ve either not trusted Title IX enough to go to them, or they’ve gone to Title IX, and they were completely failed.”

For Petherbridge’s friends in the corporate world, Human Resources quickly addresses sexual harassment concerns. “They go to HR, they give the whole thing, there’s a couple meetings … and the person who harassed them is out within two weeks,” she said. “At Harvard, you’re lucky if it takes 18 months.”

Non-citizen workers

HGSU-UAW asks for increased protection for non-citizen workers via more legal and financial support, in particular against the federal government’s immigration policies. They also seek to compensate individuals for time lost at immigration appointments. 

“We’re asking the university to not let ICE on campus unless with a judicial warrant or any other governmental agencies that might be doing that kind of immigration enforcement,” Jaswal said. 

According to the Union, the University has declared to fight for its non-citizen affiliates but has not put this verbal commitment in writing.

Union dues

Finally, the Union asks the University to require all student workers to pay HGSU-UAW regardless of membership. Under this proposal, no one will be required to join HGSU-UAW—but those who do not will nonetheless pay a “fair share” fee since the organization is required to represent all student workers regardless.

The flat Union dues are 1.44% of a student worker’s monthly salary, along with a $10 initiation fee. 

“Harvard administration claims that its position is predicated on providing ‘freedom of choice’ for workers. However, this simply cannot be true—if it were, then we would not be the only union on campus lacking a contract with the model we are asking for,” Speller and Saha wrote. 

“What we are asking for is for everybody to pay their fair share. So this means either becoming a union member, or if you don’t want to become a member, paying what’s called agency fees, which is a little bit less than standard union dues, so that we can upkeep the union,” Jaswal added. “Without fair share fees and this kind of union security in place, we are not able to afford a lot of the basic functions of our union.”

Existing Tensions

The University has been slow to respond to the articles presented, Jaswal explained. “I think that that kind of highlights two main issues in this bargaining process,” she said. “One, the University has not been doing the bare minimum of responding to our proposals in a timely fashion. And second, when they have responded, their initial response has been [to reject] essentially every single article we’ve opened.”

The Union has bargained with the University in good faith, though the administration does not seem to be coming from the same place, Jaswal continued. “We come to them with many testimonials. We are not opening articles for the fun of it.”

“We are opening them because student workers have informed us how various aspects of the contract have not been sufficient to meet their needs, and that’s why we have made and offered the changes that we have.”

Van Meir expressed broader disdain with the University after a compensation dispute. Van Meir was a TF for a class at the Harvard Kennedy School, which required 20 hours per week to grade. Upon speaking with a colleague in the Sociology department, she realized that her hours corresponded to serving as a TF for two sections, though she was only receiving pay for one. She met with the Office of Labor and Employee Relations, hoping for a resolution. “I encountered a level of hostility that I was really shocked by, because I was in this meeting with some guy in the Office of Labor and Employee Relations who was interrogating [me],” she said. 

Her Union representative secured her pay for two sections, but it should have been simpler in her eyes. “My feeling from that experience was, if this is how Harvard treats its graduate student workers, I’m not going to recommend to other Ph.D. students that they come here,” she said.

Petherbridge voiced her support for the Union, not the University. “I get like $1,500 a year from Union benefits that would not exist before I started,” she explained. “In terms of compensation, basically, everything that I’ve benefited from has been directly from Union action, not because [of] the University.”

Undergraduate Involvement

Leading up to the strike, HGSU-UAW sent undergraduate students email blasts about organized meetings and placed pamphlets in personal mailboxes in student dormitories. These actions have been specifically targeted at Harvard College enrollees.

Van Meir views the strike as important for undergraduate and graduate students alike. “[The] undergraduates’ quality of teaching will be better if the graduate students teaching them have good working conditions, and Harvard will be able to attract higher quality Ph.D. candidates if they have competitive packages for those students.”

 “What we are asking first and foremost is for solidarity from the undergraduates,” Jaswal said. “So recognition that this is a joint struggle, and that you all will benefit if we are treated better in our workplaces, because our working conditions and your learning conditions are intimately intertwined.”

Julia Bouchut ’29 (julia_bouchut@college.harvard.edu) is the Associate News Editor of the “Harvard Independent.”