How do you tell a tenured faculty chemist from a graduate student chemist? Ask her to pronounce “unionized.”
On June 30, the Harvard Graduate Student Union, HGSU-UAW, voted 2026-65 to ratify their contract with Harvard. On July 1, it went into effect for one year, providing a raft of benefits ranging from pay raises and stronger protections against harassment through to bicycle purchase reimbursements. The funds given by Harvard to HGSU-UAW for healthcare, childcare, and emergencies alone totaled almost one million dollars—a sum which Rachel Sandalow-Ash, Harvard Law School graduate, former research assistant, and emeritus HGSU-UAW bargaining committee member describes as “a start.”
This is not the end of the road for HGSU-UAW: during her interview, Sandalow-Ash is full of plans to form committees, organize, and begin negotiations for next year’s contract. However, it is a significant milestone, marking the fulfilment, after two eventful and controversial years, of one of HGSU-UAW’s major aims—and, symbolically, the Harvard community’s acceptance of HGSU-UAW’s victory.
HGSU-UAW’s journey has been dramatic, with long-lasting repercussions for the Harvard community. It gives rise to a story that everybody tells in his or her own way, a truth too complicated for any single soundbite. It is the latest segment of a fight that has been going on for decades and has spawned a few heroes, a few villains, and a whole lot of people who tried to promote their best interests to the maximum extent permissible by law. And it starts with the National Labor Relations Board.
“Since We Won Our Union”
The early history of graduate unions in general and HGSU in particular
We cannot understand HGSU-UAW without understanding the context in which it was formed and its earliest decisions were made. “For the reasons that follow,” begins the second paragraph of 2016 National Labor Relations Board decision 364 NLRB No. 90, Columbia University, “we have decided to overrule Brown University, a sharply-divided decision, which itself overruled an earlier decision, New York University.”
This potted history of recent legal debate around graduate student unionization is only a small part of a history stretching back over fifty years. The Teaching Assistants’ Association at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which began organizing in 1966 and won its first contract in 1970, claims to be the world’s oldest graduate student union. Founded in an anti-draft sit-in and, in its early years, active in some of the most violent protests of the Vietnam era, they represent almost 8,000 workers today.
UW-Madison represents the most common model for graduate student unionization, and the most contentious: graduate students as their own body, with their own union, separate from other workers. This is HGSU-UAW’s model.
However, it is not the only one. Rutgers and CUNY both have unions which represent faculty along with students, an arrangement which dates back to roughly the same time as that of the Teaching Assistants’ Association. Both systems have advantages: graduate student needs can be different to those of faculty, but, if they negotiate together, they can get results more quickly.
No matter the amount of cooperation with faculty, graduate students at that time period were not allowed to do much. In 1972, the NLRB ruled that graduate students at Adelphi University were not allowed to join the same bargaining unit as faculty, on the grounds that they were students first and workers second. Even the question of whether the NLRB has jurisdiction over universities has proven thorny: in 1951, they ruled that universities did not count as workplaces in the usual sense, being dedicated to education rather than significant commercial activity (although they reversed this ruling in 1970).
Toward the end of the twentieth century, though, there was a surge in interest in graduate unionization, centering around, among other places, UC Berkeley. This culminated in a 2000 NLRB ruling which stated that graduate students at private colleges could, in fact, form unions with all rights and privileges thereof. Between 2000 and 2006, about twenty universities across the country gained contracted student unions, including UMass Boston, Michigan State, and the California State University System. Many of these suffered, however, under the 2004 Brown ruling, which overruled NYU and claimed that graduate students were students first and workers second.
Into this ever-shifting situation stepped a small number of Harvard graduate students. Although HGSU-UAW has been working actively toward a contract for two years, its story begins much earlier. After several years in stealth mode, the union went public in 2015. Pre-election speeches both from the incumbent Vice President of the Graduate Student Council (GSC) and from a woman who would go on to win a position on it favorably mentioned the possibility of unionization. The Yale Daily News reported that the effort was led by graduate students Aaron T. Bekemeyer and Elaine F. Stranahan; the Crimson said only that they were “involved.” In September 2015, the nascent Harvard union joined with United Auto Workers and became HGSU-UAW, and, in October, the GSC voted to endorse, and not compete with, them.
At the time, Harvard was engaged in contentious negotiations with the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, which involved outside mediators and eventually lasted four months past the September 30 expiration date of the last contract. At times, Harvard and HUCTW met more than once a week.
In August 2016, the NLRB changed its tune again, arguing that, in the 2004 Brown case, “the Board erred as to a matter of statutory interpretation.” Graduate students were welcome to unionize, and Harvard could no longer ignore them. The result, though, was not a victory lap for HGSU-UAW but a trial by fire.
The union seemed popular enough on campus, and a majority of those students who were eligible to vote had signed cards supporting the election in the first place. This made it a surprise when, out of about three thousand ballots cast, one thousand were challenged, and early results revealed roughly a 55-45 split, with the majority coming out against unionization.
Almost inevitably, the result was legal drama. The NLRB had overseen the election, and Harvard and HGSU-UAW both filed objections with them. HGSU-UAW claimed that Harvard had “[omitted] the names of hundreds of eligible voters” from the lists they provided to the union, while Harvard’s objection centered around HGSU-UAW’s refusal to count a single ballot, a “no” vote, on which had been drawn a smiley face along with the message “Hello counter! Have a good day.” While, reading these quotes, we might get the idea that Harvard simply struck names off the list at random, the truth is more complicated. In the NLRB hearings, Harvard made a number of arguments, often centering around “guaranteed teaching.” Since teaching is such an integral part of the graduate student experience, Harvard guarantees that most graduate students can be guaranteed four semesters of it. The administration argued that students who had used up their guaranteed teaching should not be allowed to vote, because it was unclear if they would ever return to paid work. (On the issue of whether this was true, the NLRB Hearing Officer noted that “The parties introduced little empirical evidence” but was eventually “unconvinced by the Employer’s argument.”)
Harvard excluded other groups on the basis that the election documentation demanded that anyone who had worked for “at least one semester” be allowed to vote; while the union believed that this meant that anyone who had worked for part of a semester could vote, Harvard claimed that the right extended only to those who had worked at least one full semester.
This was not enough, however, and, eight months later, the NLRB ruled that Harvard was in error. It later claimed in a notice that “the Employer’s failure to provide a complete Voter List interfered with the employees’ exercise of a free and reasoned choice.”
On April 18, 2018, the same day that the Columbia student union authorized a strike, HGSU-UAW began its second election. This time there was a clear, although not overwhelming, majority: 1931-1523. Notably, the number of votes against unionization was almost identical to what it was in the previous election: 1526. A second, more muted, election selected 13 Bargaining Committee members selected from 21 candidates, and HGSU-UAW was on its way.
Now all they had to do was talk to Harvard.
“Good Story, If True”
A painful and protracted negotiation
HGSU-UAW would have been justified in going into this process with high hopes. As Carrie Barbash, President of HUCTW, says, “Relative to other employers, for the most part, Harvard is union-friendly.” She admits that “there’s been strikes and there have been very contentious issues,” but none more than in any relationship between an employer and a union. Other unions said the same thing. Harvard’s custodial workers and some security guards are represented by SEIU 32BJ, a branch of the Service Employees International Union. Roxana Rivera, Vice-President of SEIU 32BJ, says that,“We’ve had a relationship [with Harvard management] there and we’ve gotten to good standards,” although she emphasizes that “that hasn’t been without advocacy, without organizing.”
HGSU-UAW claims to have had a different experience, being met with what Sandalow-Ash has no difficulty calling “a wide range of illegal and bad faith tactics… everything from not responding to our requests for information to walking back previous agreements.” One particularly frustrating element was the group which Harvard brought to the negotiating table proper, or, rather, the group they didn’t bring. “Higher-level people like the Provost and the President needed to sign off on [the Harvard representatives’] decisions, but they never came into the room,” says Sandalow-Ash, likening the resultant process to “a long game of telephone.” The Harvard administration also hired the law firm of Morgan, Brown & Joy, the website of which advertises their ability to “reduce risk and protect important interests,” to provide external legal representation in the negotiations. Neither Barbash nor Rivera said that their unions had had to negotiate with anyone but Harvard employees.
(Given the previously-discussed controversy over whether graduate students are employees at all, and the Republican government at the time, HGSU-UAW leadership had been reluctant to take their grievances to the federal level for fear of forcing a test case that Harvard might win.)
HGSU-UAW faced further difficulties once their message had reached official Harvard ears. When asked about the atmosphere during a bargaining session, Sandalow-Ash began with, “Sometimes student workers would come in and talk about abuses they had experienced, and [Harvard’s] team would say things like ‘Good story, if true.’” Type-one diabetics who could not afford medical care would be told, “I don’t know why this is our problem to solve.” (She did not say whose problem, in this case, it was supposed to be.) “The administration,” she says, in conclusion, “did not want to be there at all.”
Recalcitrant employers are nothing new in the world of unionization, and, on October 26, 2019, an HGSU-UAW Facebook post announced that “2,425 of our members—90.4% of all ballots cast—voted YES to authorize a strike!” The effects, according to Sandalow-Ash, were immediate. “We had a 90-plus percent strike authorization vote and Harvard came to us and said ‘OK, maybe interim measures for sexual harassment.’” Sexual harassment protections and Title IX had been a sticking point for much of the negotiation, and the University had previously refused to compromise to an extent that would satisfy HGSU-UAW. Notably, these interim measures were suggested before the strike itself: the authorization vote had been enough.
However, interim measures were insufficient, and Harvard refused to budge on other points as well. “Another big fight we’d had was over any kind of workload protections [such as a cap on the number of hours students could be expected to work],” says Sandalow-Ash, describing Harvard’s ethos as, “How could we have any workload protections? Work is so variable. It’s so academic. It’s so fun.” On December 3, 2019, Harvard’s graduate students downed pens and went on strike.
It was, without question, the biggest news event on campus at the time. The Harvard Independent covered it. WBUR covered it. The Crimson covered it. It made national news on NPR. The Cambridge Police Department billed Harvard hundreds of thousands of dollars in security fees. In a freezing Cambridge December, graduate students marched, carried placards, and occasionally chanted, supported by other unions and undergraduates. Some professors allowed their students time off to join the picket lines. Nothing else was discussed in the dining halls.
An event such as this could have had serious consequences, for the participants and for the University. Strikers on picket lines filled out timesheets, much as they had done when working variable-hours jobs for Harvard, so that the union could justify strike pay if Harvard were to cut its members’ salaries. This did not in fact happen. There was also fear at the time that the strike could go on into the beginning of the Spring 2020 term. In fact, it ended as 2019 did, with December 31 being the last day and the first post-strike bargaining session occurring on January 7, 2020.
This session also marked another shift in Harvard’s relationship with HGSU-UAW: the employment of a federally-appointed mediator. On December 19, 2019, Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 proposed requesting help from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. According to its website, the FMCS is “an independent agency whose mission is to preserve and promote labor-management peace and cooperation.” This was eventually agreed upon by all parties, and a mediator was found.
In an update posted to the HGSU-UAW website on January 7, 2020, Lee Kennedy-Shaffer, a biostatistics Ph.D. student and Bargaining Committee member, explained the process: “Mediation involves discussions, where the two parties (the University administration and our union bargaining committee) are together in a room with the mediator… These conversations will be mostly off-the-record, to facilitate the parties’ ability to reach agreements efficiently.” He was “confident that we can make progress through mediation,” but did not appear to view it as a magic bullet.
For a while, it worked. On January 23, another update mentioned “productive discussions.” However, by February 2, a third one, written by Sandalow-Ash, claimed, “It is clear that the mediation process alone will not be sufficient to get us the contract that we need.” HGSU-UAW accused Harvard of “hiding behind Trump” and his administration’s NLRB, and privately began to plan for a second strike.
Around this time, however, Harvard and its graduate students both had greater concerns as COVID-19 spread across the world. During a May 1 bargaining session, the University put forward unchanged proposals, including a 2.8% salary increase for salaried RAs and TFs. However, in the context of the pandemic, when nobody, Harvard included, knew how much money they would be making six months down the line, this suddenly became a much more attractive offer. Harvard also offered that the contract could stand for just one year, rather than the usual three, allowing for it to be renegotiated more quickly and also not locking the administration into a three-year commitment. Both sides would benefit. The eventual contract would be debated throughout the months of May and June, and eventually be ratified on July 1 by a vote in which over 95% of workers approved.
The pandemic had made what had previously seemed like a miserly offer from Harvard much more compelling, and Harvard, critically, had decided to continue to extend said offer even through COVID. This choice, combined with the fact that the contract could be renegotiated after one year, was enough to satisfy HGSU-UAW and fully bring a contracted union of graduate students to Cambridge.
HGSU-UAW had won, but not easily. They had faced extreme pressure from the Harvard administration, pressure to which they claimed other unions were not subjected. This in particular is a serious accusation: if Harvard were just a bad environment for unions in general, HGSU-UAW should have expected nothing better, but in a more pro-union environment they would have the right to be surprised and dismayed by the way they were treated. The worst misfortune is to have known happiness, and there are many other potentially happy unions at Harvard.
“A Lot of Great Things in Partnership with Harvard”
A spotter’s guide to Harvard’s unions
Of course, HGSU-UAW was not the first Harvard union. There have been unionized workers at Harvard since 1938, ranging from maids to employees of Harvard University Press. Today, Harvard counts over six thousand, excluding graduate students. They are represented by a total of nine unions, with seven contracts between them. (Four unions bargain together as members of the Area Trades Council and share a contract, and one has two.) These include custodians, janitorial staff, clerks, HUPD officers, and gardeners and horticultural technicians at the Arnold Arboretum.
Carrie Barbash, President of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), while she believed HGSU-UAW’s allegations about Harvard’s bargaining practices, refused to comment beyond saying that the way they were treated was “frustrating and disappointing” because “we [HUCTW] haven’t had that experience.” “Relative to other employers,” she said, “for the most part, Harvard is union-friendly.” While acknowledging that there have been “strikes and… very contentious issues,” she said that HUCTW had achieved “a lot of great things in partnership with Harvard over the years that may have initially come out of various difficult conversations but ultimately led to really positive work together.” Her tone in general was very different to that of the graduate student interviewees, which led inexorably to the question of why two unions, working for the same bosses, should have felt so very differently.
Part of the difference in outlook between HUCTW and HGSU-UAW is a difference in scope. For Barbash, the unionization experience was not just about negotiating on a grand scale for contracts and concessions, but about the routine business of working for an employer. “The most common and most frequent [negotiation between HUCTW and Harvard] is on a day-to-day basis with individual members,” she said, whether that involve reconciling disagreements between union workers and supervisors or organizing flexible schedules. (Negotiating with HR managers on behalf of members takes place “constantly.”) HGSU-UAW has only just received money for a copay reimbursement fund, as a major element of its new contract; HUCTW has one too, which is renegotiated “on an ongoing basis” and is handled by a committee. There is a formal contract negotiation between HUCTW and Harvard every year, but it is not the be all and end all of discussion.
Negotiations are also much less contentious for HUCTW than for HGSU-UAW. HUCTW formally dates back to a 1989 ratification, and, at the time, the Harvard administration had tried to block their formation too: after winning an election in 1988, it was months until the final NLRB appeal was settled in their favor. The union is more accepted on campus today, and, when the Independent asked her about various inconveniences that HGSU-UAW claimed to have been put through, Barbash could find few equivalent ones in her own experience. She did not recall Harvard having hired outside legal representation, for example, nor did she feel like it would be difficult to get in touch with high-level Harvard decision-makers if she had to. This has not made her job trivial: since the 2008 financial crash, she believes, “Things have gotten more challenging around money,” and the union has had several delayed contracts after decades of always being able to negotiate on time. However, “Our conversations,” she feels, “for the most part, are respectful.”
SEIU 32BJ, part of the larger Service Employees International Union, has had similar experiences to HUCTW. It represents janitorial workers and security staff on Harvard’s campus. Roxana Riviera, Vice President, said that, “We’ve had a relationship [with Harvard] there and we’ve gotten to good standards, but that hasn’t been without advocacy, without organizing.” She pointed out that, given that HGSU-UAW’s negotiations involved “key issues, for the workforce as well as Harvard” such as Title IX protections and an open versus closed shop union environment, we should expect them to be more than usually difficult. Like Barbash, she believed that her union and Harvard could work together; also like Barbash, she said this could be difficult: “Each time our collective bargaining agreement was set to expire, we have had to collectively unite with workers and make our demands clear… so that we could ensure we had the standards and protections that we needed.” She also did not regularly deal with outside legal representation.
Both HUCTW and SEIU 32BJ have close relationships with HGSU-UAW. Barbash spoke at the rally on the first day of the HGSU-UAW strike, and, while she does not want to “force our advice on them,” has been happy to “sit down and talk” about strategy and about the experience of being a Harvard union. Riviera said that HGSU-UAW “asked [for] direct support from the [32BJ] workers during, for example, the strike, and [32BJ has] been able to support some of their activity.” 32BJ in particular has, in recent times, had a close relationship with student advocates. In 2011, the Occupy Harvard movement demanded, successfully, that contract workers such as security guards be allowed to take part in the TAP program, which allows eligible Harvard employees to take classes at the Harvard Extension School for $40, or at any other school for 10% of the usual tuition, alongside their hired colleagues. During the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, HGSU-UAW organized efforts to provide protective equipment for Harvard’s cleaners. Although, according to Riviera, while “We [HGSU and 32BJ] have not been working on anything formally together,” “We’ve supported each other when these moments have come.”
For a Harvard union, then, the early relationship between HGSU-UAW and the administration was unusually contentious, but there are many ways in which HGSU-UAW is unusual for a Harvard union. As the NLRB’s multiple changes of opinion demonstrate, graduate students occupy a unique place in the world of labor, and we cannot get a full picture of the average graduate student union experience, such as it exists, while staying on Harvard’s campus. For comparison, we turn to other graduate unions, some of which have had similar experiences to HGSU-UAW.
“No Reference to Us as Employees”
A comparable case: the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees
In April 2016, graduate students at Georgetown University formed the Georgetown Doctoral Students Coalition, or DSC, to protest changes to Ph.D. work requirements. This was not a union: graduate student unions would not be NLRB-approved until August. It was simply a pressure group, whose activities revolved around organizing a petition, writing op-eds in Georgetown’s student newspaper The Hoya, and handing out flyers. Brent McDonnell, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Georgetown’s History department, claims that this was successful, as the University decided to “pause that decision until hearing more from graduate TAs.” As soon as the NLRB allowed it, the DSC pivoted to unionization efforts.
There had been interest in unionizing within the DSC before then. The first post on their Facebook page, now no longer updated, is from April 7, 2016; as early as April 28, 2016, the managers posted a link to a Huffington Post article entitled, “It’s Time Undergrads Care About Graduate Student Unions.” Less than a month later, on May 11, they linked to a UAW press release about the Columbia graduate students’ fight for the right to unionize. (This was the fight that did in fact lead to the NLRB decision.) Finally, and most importantly, on June 2, they shared a Cornell Sun article detailing an agreement between Cornell graduate students and administrators. Should the NLRB ever allow graduate student unions, Cornell’s students could vote to become one. The DSC wanted to be a union, and it is unsurprising that, on the day the NLRB released its decision, they posted an update saying “This fall, DSC will be hosting a public conversation about what this means for doctoral students at Georgetown. We encourage you to join in!” Through 2016 and 2017, the page promoted graduate union content.
During the 2017 spring semester, Georgetown students formally voted to form the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees, or GAGE. They took thirteen months to reach a contract, during negotiations which, by McDonnell’s description, were very different to those between HGSU-UAW and Harvard. There is at least one similarity, though, in the way that both unions had to fight to be allowed to exist, a fight which is all the stranger in the context of Georgetown’s Just Employment Policy. This document affirms “that all working members [of the Georgetown community] have the right to freely associate and organize,” which should have implied that the GAGE vote would go through without a hitch. However, as McDonnell put it, “The university made it clear to us that they did not think that the Just Employment Policy applied to us because they did consider us employees. They considered us students… and they were considering, at first, taking it to the NLRB.” This dichotomy still exists: “There’s no reference to us as employees or employment in the contract,” says McDonnell. Instead, the workers are called Graduate Student Assistants.
In fact, McDonnell said, Georgetown’s position “actually helped our campaign, because it made people quite angry at the university, and so we were able to organize around this.” In general, he characterized Georgetown as media-shy: “The University struck me as being very concerned about not negotiating through the media… they really wanted to keep things at the table, so to speak.” This immediately put them in tension with the union, which relied on regular media updates to keep its membership engaged. “One of the more tense moments that came at the table was around the year mark [one year into bargaining]… we as GAGE held a rally right outside of the building when the negotiations were taking place, on the day of the negotiations or maybe the day before, and that did not particularly please their bargaining team.”
If this is as tense as the bargaining got, you would expect that it was generally fairly smooth, and you would be right. “There hasn’t been a strike on campus, to my knowledge, in the period that I’ve been working at Georgetown,” said McDonnell. While acknowledging that, “There was… an initial attempt to stonewall us and to make it more difficult for us to unionize,” he said that, “Once we were able to get [Georgetown] to agree to an election, they were, generally speaking, just [a] standard employer with respect to their treatment of us as a union.” Georgetown did employ outside representation in negotiation, from international law firm Morgan Lewis, but McDonnell did not find this worthy of comment beyond confirming that it happened. He put the general politeness, which included a lack of anything he would call regressive bargaining, down to Georgetown’s instinct to ensure it continued to look good in the press.
The eventual contract had many features in common with that of HGSU-UAW. It included wage increases, better healthcare, and harassment protections. (While Harvard’s graduate students negotiated for Harvard to create pools from which the union could give aid to those struggling to pay for healthcare, Georgetown’s simply negotiated new plans and lower out-of-pocket maximums.) Like HGSU-UAW’s contract, the provisions in GAGE’s were not much changed by the pandemic; in GAGE’s case, this was because “we were so far along at that point” that most things had been decided. Also like HGSU-UAW, GAGE does not view the contract as the culmination of all their hopes and dreams. They are working towards building connections with other unions, they have ongoing meetings with the university through a Labor Management Committee, they support Black Lives Matter, and of course the future negotiations for the next contract are always in the backs of their minds.
McDonnell said that, when the Georgetown students heard that HGSU-UAW had a contract, they were “shocked, but very pleasantly shocked.” Harvard and Columbia, he said, had a reputation within GAGE that made them “emblematic of the harshest responses” towards student unionization. In large part, this came from their willingness to take legal action and go all the way to the NLRB, while Georgetown never made good on its own NLRB threats and has even committed to allowing GAGE to continue to exist should the NLRB rule that graduate students no longer have union rights. This sums up the contrast between Harvard and Georgetown better than anything else: Georgetown accepted decisions it found unfavorable, while Harvard fought them. The result was that unionization had that much of an easier time at Georgetown and was able to get a contract faster and more easily. This, strangely, is a good indicator for HGSU-UAW in the future. Georgetown’s example proves that, once a university accepts the existence of a graduate student union, productive bargaining can result. Harvard’s administration has accepted the existence of HGSU-UAW and signed a contract. This could well lead to a shift in attitudes that will make HGSU-UAW’s work much easier.
At the time of writing, the Google Form to collect signatures for the DSC’s original work requirements petition was still online.
Georgetown’s case backs up the claim that Harvard’s tactics were indeed hard-hearted. As a Harvard union and as a graduate student union, HGSU-UAW could have expected better than what it got, and many of the difficulties they faced can be attributed to that. However, if their anger is to be justified, they must have been, in some way, in the right in the first place. It is in fact too simplistic to say that they were a universally-beloved group rising up against administratorial oppression, and there were many students who would have preferred that Harvard succeed in keeping the union down.
In the early days of the campaign, the Crimson ran the headline, “Undergrads uncertain about unionization.” The article contained only anecdotes, not hard data, but the lack of excitement over the issue among undergraduates was not surprising: true anti-union feeling on campus was always among the graduate students.
“The Committee’s Wanton Disregard”
The rise and fall of anti-union feeling on campus
We cannot say that, from the first, HGSU-UAW was popular among all its potential members. The anti-union movement began as early as October 2015, and one of its biggest voices on campus was Jae Hyeon Lee. At the time, he was a third-year physics Ph.D. candidate, and from the number of documents he wrote seems to have spearheaded the counter-unionization efforts. Inspired in part by a Cornell anti-unionization blog, “At What Cost,” he wrote and published a website entitled, “Graduate Student Unionization: A Critical Approach.” This site, and its accompanying Facebook page, “Against HGSU-UAW,” became rallying points for graduate students who did not feel that unionizing with UAW was the right choice at the time. Over 350 people liked it, and over 400 followed it.
Much of the content of these pages was not news to the union. “A Critical Approach” points out that, in the event of a hypothetical strike, “You may not be paid and could lose your benefits.” When the actual strike occurred, HGSU-UAW directed its members, and provided materials, to keep track of time spent on the picket line in case Harvard did stop pay and HGSU needed to provide instead. This did not in fact happen, but the fear was there.
However, academic debate over the pros and cons of unionization was only one of the hot topics on these pages. The other was the behavior of union representatives and pro-union students. The Facebook page, still live, documents various alleged misbehavior, ranging from taking down “Vote NO” posters and throwing them away, to submitting “f*** you for being anti-union! solidarity with the working class forever! [sic]” to a Google Form meant to collect signatures for an anti-union petition. (The anti-unionists were themselves unfailingly polite on these pages: a December 15, 2017 comment by Sam Klug, inviting all and sundry to “stop by and join us in an open discussion,” incited no hate. In fact, it incited no reply at all, save two likes by pro-union students.) In an April 2018 Crimson op-ed, Noah Bloch, a second-year Biological and Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. student, claimed to have witnessed a student arguing against unionization at a Harvard Medical School event “called a liar, laughed at, and interrupted by pro-union members, until audience members intervened.”
Elizabeth West, a since-graduated Ph.D. candidate in Physics, backs this up. In an email interview with the Independent, she described the behavior of union representatives as “fairly civil… nothing worse than the kind of clench-jawed smiling antagonism that is usual between political opponents when passions are running high.” West makes a distinction between HGSU-UAW committee members and simply its supporters, claiming that the latter went so far as to attempt to hack anti-union organizers but that the former were not involved.
Argumentativeness tends to surround any contentious campus issue, and this was no different. According to “A Critical Approach,” though, these dubious tactics went beyond name-calling. “When the committee [formed by the GSC to investigate the possibility of unionization] completed their investigation,” says a page entitled, “Origin of HGSU-UAW” and calling itself a “personal perspective,” “rather than reporting back to the general assembly for a discussion, the committee members by themselves decided that the HGSU as a whole should begin the organizing effort with the UAW.” UAW became the default without a vote. This would not be the first time that HGSU-UAW had in some way maneuvered around the official GSC way of doing things: as early as 2013, before the idea of the union had been publicly floated, several early organizers ran for GSC offices with stated intent to “change the perception of graduate students from students to employees.” This ensured that, even though most students did not know that there was a union at all, those in power supported it. These sorts of insular tactics apparently extended beyond simply forming the union: “A Critical Approach” claims that the choice to partner with UAW was made without the consent of the main body of members, and that, “When HGSU members returned to Harvard for the fall [2015] semester, many were appalled by the committee’s wanton disregard of the organization’s rules and procedures.”
The uncomfortable amount of power that the union had, and how early it had it, was a common theme amongst the anti-union students to whom the Independent spoke. West mentioned that, even in 2017, it sent a bus to the January 21 Women’s March in Washington, DC, “an event that issued a pro-choice platform and disinvited its pro-life feminist sponsors.” This is not out of character for the HGSU-UAW she describes. “The union advocates,” she said, “would often [when challenged in certain ways about the pragmatic aspects of unionization] shift keys to lofty rhetoric about the real meaning of unionization being solidarity with oppressed classes and claiming the power to change institutions from within.” More generally, “Many HGSU-UAW supporters viewed the union as a way of amplifying their power, prestige, and funding in order to promote causes they support.”
Momchil Tomov, at the time a second-year Ph.D. student in Psychology, had complementary worries to these: “We [the anti-union students] just felt like the whole thing was very rushed.” He told the Independent that he was worried about there not being enough “debate and frank open discussion about the pros and cons,” going so far as to describe the atmosphere as “Orwellian.” He wound up in favor of unionization by the time of the second election, having had the time to think it over, but he believes that that extra time was necessary.
Helen Yang, a former Ph.D. candidate in Biophysics, did not appreciate the second election as much as Tomov. “The first time we voted on this,” she said, “the union didn’t pass, and then they somehow found some excuse to have another vote.” The prevailing spirit among everyone who spoke to us was that HGSU-UAW had a very particular vision for what a union should be, one that was not shared by everyone, and that they could be overly uncompromising in pursuit of that vision.
Ironically, the anti-unionization movement had a hard time standing up to the nascent power bloc that was HGSU-UAW due in part to their lack of organization. West said that, rather than a single movement, there were people who “found each other through the grapevine and coordinated some activities.” Yang pointed out that, “The students who are not for the union don’t have an organization, don’t have any funding to do any type of canvassing like [HGSU-UAW’s]… we don’t have an organization or a union behind us. We’re just individuals.” This approach had some benefits, such as a diversity of thought that some felt HGSU itself lacked. West says, “We were always clear that we were acting as individuals and had different reasons for our opposition to HGSU-UAW.” This is in contrast to HGSU’s attitude, which Tomov describes as one where “there was an implicit understanding that if you were against ‘our union’ you were against ‘us.’” However, fundamentally, the lack of a formal organization was always going to be a disadvantage. When I asked Yang whether she and the other anti-union students ever considered organizing, she claimed to have been “very busy” with work and argued that UAW was paying people to help out. Their resources were simply superior.
The union won its second election. Tomov said that, once this happened, the movement “disengaged… there was no point.” Yang mentioned a couple of formerly anti-union students who ran for positions in the new union to ensure that the voices of the students who voted against it would be represented, but said that she thinks they lost. She could not immediately remember their names. Both “A Critical Approach” and “At What Cost” died. The former site is still live but has not been updated since 2018, while the latter exists only on internet archives. Its domain name is now used by a blog advertising “discount goods ranging from lamps and steamers to tents and punching bags.”
History seems to have come down on the side of the union: the contract brought extra benefits and pay increases, and research and teaching have gone on without long-lasting disruption. The treatment of anti-union agitators by pro-union ones is a black mark on HGSU-UAW’s history, but not a major one, and one that will fade with time. It was uncertain for a while, but the union has won the battle for legitimacy among the students as decisively as it has won the battle for recognition among administrators. The only question left is what it will do with that victory in the future.
“You Have the Power”
Where HGSU-UAW goes from here
HGSU-UAW is without doubt an extreme case. Everything related to Harvard will in some way be extreme simply by virtue of the name, but even controlling for that HGSU-UAW stands out. Compared to other unions, it has had a uniquely acrimonious relationship with the Harvard administration, and not the least difficult one with its own representees. That has not stopped it working towards its goals for the betterment of the graduate students’ lot, and it shows every indication of being strong enough to continue to do so.
Time has not made HGSU-UAW any less confrontational or direct. Through October of this year, they posted “Spooky Stories from Harvard” on their Facebook page. These consisted of “Did You Know” facts, many of which argued that the money and benefits provided in the contract were not enough. They were both a way to list grievances and a recruitment drive: the final one, published on October 31, began “Did you know that you have the power to make these stories stop?” and listed ways to get involved with or join the union.
At the same time, though, HGSU-UAW have developed a closer relationship with the Harvard administration: a post from September 23 claimed to have “handled over 40 workplace issues from student workers in the first few months alone, and… won 20.” They have been getting involved in broader Union activities as well: during the early stages of the pandemic, they helped provide, and lobbied for Harvard to provide, personal protective equipment for custodial workers. More recently, they endorsed several candidates for the House and Senate in November’s elections. The impression is of a group maturing, becoming more secure in its power, even as it determines what that power actually is.
As befits a pioneering group, HGSU-UAW’s story is, in a word, messy. Nobody comes out looking perfect. The Harvard administration was brutally unwilling to bargain in good faith. Union members disregarded the opinions of non-union graduate students in ways ranging from simply fast-tracking decisions without consulting them to outright harassment. Nor were these non-union students martyrs: many of their fears were overblown and they wound up fighting against a group which, eventually, bargained for a contract beneficial enough to be ratified by a vote of two thousand twenty-six to sixty-five.
It is a messy story, but that makes it no less inspiring. Ten seconds of living in the world cures you of the illusion that it is made up of heroic heroes and villainous villains. Rather, as in the case of HGSU-UAW, it is full of people who do their best for what they believe in. Stories simple enough to tell in a single soundbite are stories of people who put in very little effort. It’s the messy stories that end up making something real.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the Independent.
Photograph by Marissa Garcia ’21.