My name is Cole Meisenhelder, and I am a G4 in Physics and facilitated yesterday’s bargaining session. This was our last scheduled session before our strike deadline. We reached no new tentative agreements and the administration showed no effort to resolve our key disagreements. We will be bargaining again for 2.5 hours on Monday, December 2, despite having offered bargaining 24 hours/day everyday until December 3.
In addition to not advancing at the table, the administration escalated their intimidation campaign yesterday, misrepresenting their positions in Harvard-wide emails and seeking to disempower us. We know how valuable our work is to Harvard, and their disinformation campaign reflects an acknowledgement of our power. Instead of engaging on the substance of student worker concerns and working with our bargaining team to address these issues, the administration spreads misinformation about grievance procedures and chooses to protect the “right” of faculty to retaliate against student workers through academics. To read about the issues still on the table, you can see our proposals and a description of each one on our website.
We discussed Discipline & Discharge, Union Access, Grievance & Arbitration, Management Rights, Workload, and No Strike/No Lockout. One important area where we have made progress is that we have ensured grievable workload protections for science research assistants, but the administration continues to offer inadequate protections for teaching assistants. Under their proposal, even if a teaching assistant teaches one section, they can be made to work up to 20 hours/week without recourse.
We are committed to getting a fair contract and believe this is possible before December 3 if the administration wants to put in the time. But it is clear from yesterday that the University has no intention of working with the bargaining committee to get a deal and we are left with no choice but to strike. To get a fair contract, we will need a strike that shows the administration how committed we are. The Bargaining committee calls on all of you to join us on the picket line at 10:00 am on December 3. You can sign up for picket shifts here and read our official strike notice on our website. Please read the notice to learn about our rights and responsibilities during a strike.
In Solidarity,
Cole Meisenhelder, Physics
