My name is Cory McCartan and I’m a G1 in statistics and a member of the bargaining committee. I facilitated yesterday’s mediated bargaining session with the university. We reached three new tentative agreements: holidays, vacations, and personal days; parking and transit; and the employee assistance program. These are important wins, but on other big issues—like protections against discrimination and harassment, workload, and compensation—the administration is still choosing not to make progress.
In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be holding general membership meetings across all schools and departments. Please come and share your ideas and thoughts about collective action we have taken so far and what strategies we should pursue going forward to win a contract! Here’s a list of general meetings that have already been scheduled; be on the lookout for more emails from your department leaders. We’ve scheduled them jurisdictionally for convenient planning, but you should feel free to attend any meeting that’s convenient:
UNION CALENDAR
| MondayTime’s Up Advocates training; 9–11:30am. RSVP here. | TuesdayOrganizer Training6pm; email hgsu.general@gmail.com for more info | WednesdayHLSWCC 1010; 12–1:30pmCambridge STEMJefferson 356; 5–6:30pmCambridge HumanitiesBoylson Fong Auditorium; 5:15–6:30pm | ThursdayHGSELarsen 106; 4–5:30pmDMSTMEC 250; 4–5:30pmCambridge Social SciencesTBA; 4:30pm | FridayHSPHTBA; 1–2:30pmGSD/HAA/AFVSTBA; 1–2:30pm |
You can still take the strike survey as well.
New tentative agreements:
- Holidays, Vacations, and Personal Days: We’ve guaranteed federal holidays and winter recess for all student workers (or an equivalent number of days off if work requires your presence on a holiday), and the right to take religious holidays as necessary. We’ve also won one personal day per semester for teaching assistants (you can take these days for any reason), as well as 10 vacation days and 3 personal days for full-year salaried research assistants. We have not yet formally signed this tentative agreement, but we expect to do so in the coming days.
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Once we sign the contract, salaried student workers will have access to a program that provides help with mental health and crisis care, legal and financial advice, grief and loss, and other personal problems. Although student workers never had access to EAP, other workers on campus already have access to it and now salaried student workers will, too. You can read more about the program here.
- Parking and Transit: We’ve ensured a minimum level of discounts on MBTA passes, as well as giving all student workers access to the biking and parking benefits other Harvard employees have. While student workers had access to some MBTA benefits, biking and parking benefits are new benefits for us.
We’re trying to reach agreements on…
The administration put forward a proposal on Appointment Security that starts to meet the needs of our members who face precarity in teaching appointments when enrollment fluctuates and in labs when PIs leave the university. We’re continuing to work to improve this proposal but believe there are real benefits here. We moved towards the administration’s positions in order to reach compromises on Appointment Notification Letter, Health Benefits, Upper G-year Student Worker Support, and Union Access and Rights. The administration hasn’t yet reciprocated our good faith efforts, but we’re hopeful that we can reach agreement on at least some of these issues. You can find the updated positions here. If you have any questions, please reach out!
We’re facing serious challenges with…
- Workload: We’ve spent months working with faculty and administrators on Harvard’s bargaining team to try to set reasonable workload protections for teaching fellows. The university agreed that if you’re getting paid for one section, you shouldn’t be asked to do the work of two or more sections. They agreed to tell workers up front, in their appointment letters, how much they’d be expected to work.
Today, they walked back on all of that. Now they say that all salaried workers, regardless of appointments, should be required to work up to 20 hours a week—even if they’re only teaching one section, and only being paid for one section! We know overwork is a huge issue for many student workers, so we’re going to keep insisting on some reasonable protections.
- Union Security: Running a union isn’t free. Once we sign a contract, we’ll start paying dues, which will give us the money to handle grievances, enforce the contract, and administer benefits like the emergencies fund. Since all of us will benefit from these things, we should all chip in to support their cost, regardless of who joins the union and who doesn’t. It’s important that our union have enough funding to be able to actually operate. The administration still maintains that workers shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of these costs. Their proposal would seriously undermine our power as a union and our ability to continue to improve our working conditions. When every other union on campus and nearly every other private-sector workplace in the state has what we’re proposing, it’s hard to see their position as anything other than yet another way to bust our union.
- Discrimination and Harassment: The administration continues to insist on carving out protections against discrimination and harassment from our contractual grievance procedure. They also insist on not holding faculty members accountable for academic retaliation against students who try to enforce their rights under the contract. You can find their proposal here.
- Compensation: Harvard continues to make very small changes to its compensation proposal, while not addressing our need to provide real pay stability. They’re up to 2.7% year-to-year raises for research assistants, but we’ve yet to get a commitment on how much teaching assistants will be paid and whether they’ll get raises at all. We can’t accept a contract that is worse than what we already have.
We don’t have great news from the bargaining room, but in the coming weeks, with a strong organizing plan, we can win this contract! Please be in touch to talk about mediation and organizing!
Solidarity,
Cory
