Graduate Students’ Union Weights Bargaining Priorities Ahead of Third Contract Negotiation

Harvard graduate student union organizers presented articles for the union’s third contract in a general membership meeting on Thursday, the first major step toward bargaining with the University later this semester.

Organizers from the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers — which represents roughly 5,000 teaching fellows, teaching assistants, course assistants, and research assistants — presented proposals to change appointment letter rules and grievance procedures as potential bargaining topics.

Bargaining committee member Benjamin B. Daniels said that members are hoping to extend the deadline to file a grievance from 30 days to 90. Grievance procedures — third-party arbitration in particular — have been a central demand from HGSU-UAW since it was formed in 2018.

The union’s current contract, which was agreed to after a three-day strike in 2021, expires on June 30. Union members have until Wednesday to vote on the first two bargaining priorities, and bargaining committee members say they will present other articles later in the process.

According to organizers, the union’s highest-priority issues include cost of living adjustments in pay and agency shop — an agreement requiring members of the bargaining unit to pay fees to HGSU-UAW regardless of their union membership.

“The largest priority is having a paycheck that keeps up with inflation,” HGSU-UAW President Sara V. Speller said.

COLA clauses, which tie wages directly to inflation, was a central priority in the UAW’s contract negotiations with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis in 2023. Organizers say they are debating which inflation metric to peg wages to in their proposal.

Daniels also said the bargaining committee plans to present and approve an agency shop article “as soon as possible.”

“Our structure has now fallen behind the structure of other similar unions at Harvard and half the other private universities,” he said. “So bringing that into line with the other universities is absolutely a top priority for us.”

During the union’s 2021 negotiations, the University’s refusal to add agency shop — alongside stipulations for independent arbitration — to the contract pushed members to go on strike. Harvard’s union for clerical and technical workers and the union for janitorial staff both have agency shop agreements in place.

The graduate student union ratified its first four-year contract in 2021 after a contentious unionization battle beginning in 2015. Over the course of bargaining — first for a provisional contract during the pandemic, then for the four-year agreement — the union went on strike twice, with arbitration and compensation at the crux of the stalemate.

In the final agreement, which expires this June, the University increased compensation, but did not concede to demands for independent arbitration.

Union member and fifth-year Government Ph.D. student Dorothy Manevich cited the University’s response to accusations of sexual harassment against Government professor Jorge I. Dominguez — first reported in 2018 — as an impetus for HGSU-UAW’s continued calls for a new grievance procedure.

“It was absolutely horrific that the University turned a blind eye to decades of sexual harassment by a senior faculty member,” Manevich said. “The University cannot be trusted to investigate itself, and so we need third-party arbitration for those cases.”

As in previous years, the union wants to ratify a contract with wage increases commensurate with inflation. In a survey of members conducted in the fall, 88 percent of respondents said they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent — something organizers hope to change.

“They currently do not pay a significant portion of their workers a living wage,” Speller said.

Many members are not optimistic that the third contract negotiation period will be less contentious than the first two.

Bargaining committee member Alexis R. Miranda said they expect “a pretty significant fight with the University” for the upcoming bargaining sessions.

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in an emailed statement that Harvard is “committed to negotiating a contract that continues to recognize the strong contributions of HGSU-UAW members to the university’s research and teaching mission,” pointing to 2021’s contract and a raise in stipends to $50,000 for PhD students in 2023.

“We look forward to negotiations with Harvard Graduate Student Workers-United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW) and finding common ground when discussions begin on the next contract,” he wrote.

HGSU-UAW will enter negotiations alongside the affiliated Harvard Undergraduate Workers’ Union-UAW, which has been bargaining for its first contract for almost a year, and Harvard Academic Workers-UAW, which began negotiations in September.

According to Speller, HGSU-UAW will likely organize in coordination with its sister unions.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” she said. “I think there certainly will be some kind of unified efforts.”

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at hugo.chiasson@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.
—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.