Unionized academic workers at Harvard University say they have not set a strike date but a union official said it would take a significant shift by the administration to avoid one.
“I don’t see a path to resolution until we get closer on those issues and I think we’re already pretty close to our bottom lines,” said Greg Given, a preceptor in expository writing at Harvard and a member of Harvard Academic Workers – United Auto Workers union’s bargaining committee.
Union members will decide on a strike deadline in the coming weeks and plan to bargain up until that deadline.
“We’re always in dialogue with our colleagues and trying to ensure that we understand where everybody is at, what people are willing to fight for, what people are ready to move on… that’s all stuff we’re going to continue doing,” Given said.
HAW-UAW represents approximately 2,600 researchers, teachers and instructors across several schools at Harvard. The union said on July 27 that of the 1,366 union members who participated in a voluntary vote to authorize a strike, almost 94 percent voted in favor, well above the two thirds majority needed. The vote took place between March 27 and July 25. While the union represents 2,600 faculty members, not all of them have signed authorization cards to make them union members. A request to know what percent of members may not have cast a vote was not answered by publication time.
“It’s so obvious that they’re not meeting us anywhere close to the middle,” said Hannah Grunwald, a union organizer and a post-doctoral fellow studying genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Grunwald said she voted to authorize a strike, adding, “I personally don’t want to strike. I would like to do my work. I love my work. But it’s really validating to know that, when the time comes, if we have to ask Harvard to step up, we will have the pressure to do so.”
Nearly two years of negotiations
The strike authorization comes after nearly two years of negotiations with school administrators. Since Sept. 2024, organizers in HAW-UAW’s “large unit,” which represents about 2,500 non-tenure track researchers and teachers in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and medical and divinity schools, have held 44 bargaining sessions with administrators.
The large unit is demanding protections for non-U.S. citizen workers, adequate recourse for discrimination and harassment, job security and workload protections, fair pay and the right to a strong union. Some of the demands overlap with the demands of Harvard’s graduate student union, which ended its own 40-day strike on June 1, despite no agreement with administrators.
HAW-UAW also operates a “small unit” of about 100 clinical instructors at the law school – that unit bargains separately and would not strike if one is called.
Areas of ongoing concern
Grunwald said she doesn’t understand why administrators are pushing back on the proposals, which she thinks align with its values and are not costly to the university.
Given said the negotiation process has been exhausting, and its length has caused some non-tenure track faculty to lose their jobs, despite the union and the administration having agreed upon provisions to continue employment for non-tenure track faculty. He also is frustrated that raises and cost-of-living adjustments have been frozen for the length of the negotiations, despite non-union workers receiving them. “[Harvard has] an obligation under labor law to maintain status quo working conditions,” he said.
The union is also pushing for protections for “stipendees,” a designation administrators give to employees who have applied for and won grant funding to fund their university positions or are paid through stipends instead of W-2 wages. The union contends that stipendees receive fewer protections and less pay for what is often the same exact work as workers designated as employees and that administrators don’t even know how many workers they’ve categorized as one or the other.
Harvard administrators have not publicly addressed the strike authorization and did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Its academic unionization website was updated a few days before the strike authorization was announced and provides administrators, department chairs and faculty supervisors information to prepare for a potential strike.
The strike authorization comes amid more layoffs in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In recent weeks, 36 current FAS employees were laid off and 28 more were offered a choice between different roles or layoffs, according to the Harvard Crimson. Given acknowledged that the contract negotiation will not be able forestall layoffs or employees not being reappointed. “We can set some hard workload limits and job protections that will, hopefully, in the future, grant [administrators] less flexibility to force workers to pick up slack from our colleagues who’ve been let go,” Given said in a follow-up message shared with Cambridge Day.
The union’s large unit has also filed two unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
The first charge was filed after administrators increased the limit of students enrolled in the expository writing program’s first-year “studio sequence” courses from 10 to 15, after departing instructors were not replaced. The other charge was filed after administrators allegedly designated some employees as “supervisors” then told them they couldn’t be union members, although their roles did not change. While union organizers and administrators agree that employees who serve in supervisory roles cannot be involved in the union, they do not agree on who actually counts as a supervisor.
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