January 2021
Volume 1
Issue 4
Help set the priorities for our next contract
Six and a half months ago, you helped ratify the first HGSU contract which secured raises, healthcare and childcare funding pools, harassment and discrimination protections, and a host of other provisions for student workers across the university. With just under six months left in our historic first contract, we have been diligently and urgently preparing to negotiate our second contract. In December, members elected the HGSU Bargaining Committee and now, we have officially launched our bargaining survey. This tool provides workers with a direct way to voice their concerns, shape our bargaining goals for our second contract, and work towards building a better, more equitable Harvard.
The bargaining survey is an important guiding document that allows for students workers—union members and nonmembers—to voice their needs and priorities going into this period of bargaining with the university. In the survey, you will be asked a number of questions regarding compensation, racial justice, equity, working conditions, and other topics that directly affect student workers. Your input will allow the HGSU Bargaining Committee to collect data and propose collective bargaining goals which will be put to a vote in March 2021.
This survey is an important step for our union. It will determine our organizing priorities, identify our non-negotiable demands, and fuel the fight for our future. We ask you to be candid. Open up and let us know what you believe is most important. We look forward to your input, and we hope the survey provides a platform for passion and reflection. If you have any questions about the survey, please reach out to any members of the bargaining committee at hgsu.general@gmail.com.
Contract enforcement updates
In the new year, your union continues to fight fiercely to enforce safe working conditions, reasonable pay, and other contract guarantees. Notably, the grievance regarding the exclusion of Population Health Sciences students from HGSU remains an ongoing issue.
We also want to remind you about an important new resource: our public collection of anonymized grievance wins and testimonials for you to share with fellow workers. Read on to learn how the union won fair pay and safe working conditions for student workers across the university last fall.
Pay
Two major cases were resolved by union grievance officers last semester regarding fair pay and compensation. After a scandal regarding racist blog posts by a course preceptor upended a course in the Government department, graduate teaching fellows poured additional time and labor into keeping educational efforts on track while ensuring no student was required to attend lectures in a potentially hostile and racist environment. HGSU grievance officers negotiated just compensation for these student workers facing major changes in workload and duties to ensure a safe and open learning environment. In the second case, at the start of the pandemic, the Graduate School of Design administration did not pay student workers for months. Student workers promptly filed a grievance. Union grievance officers helped secure back pay for missed compensation and adjustments for future pay cycles.
COVID-19 Safety
During the fall, it quickly became clear that student workers from many departments were facing a systemic issue that put their health and safety at risk. In-person lab workers at hospital-affiliated labs did not have access to COVID-19 testing. HGSU grievance officers were instrumental in connecting these student workers, who were all facing this same issue. According to the testimonial, “[HGSU] coordinated meetings between affected students who were interested in doing something to change the status quo, including a student worker who had already started a successful petition to the HMS Dean of Graduate Education, and provided a formal line of communication between the affected students as a group and the Dean’s office.” Due to organizing pressure and before any official union action was taken, Harvard made moves to resolve this gap in testing access. One student worker involved in this case stated they “believe that the public and private pressure from HGSU expedited the resolution of this issue, allowing all graduate SWs working in labs to access on-demand testing at Harvard testing sites.”
Members – Vote on our 2021 Budget!
As we discussed in our last GMM, the Finance and Benefits Committee and Executive Board have prepared a budget proposal for 2021 that aims to increase transparency and encourage participation of members in our spending decisions. Under our current system, our resources belong to a single “General Fund” which supports all of the work our Local does. This proposal would divide our income into a series of separate funds for 2021, each dedicated to specific purposes, which would be used to guide our spending decisions and reported on to membership at each GMM. The details of these were presented in a motion at the meeting, which was tabled until February in order to allow members who were not present at the meeting to review the motions and provide comments. We encourage all members (and non-members!) to review the motion and submit any recommended amendments, comments, or questions—you can contact hgsu.finance@gmail.com to find out how.
Where do we go from here?: Labor, politics, and essential work
The labor movement is at a crossroads at this moment in history. At Harvard, throughout the United States, and across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated working conditions and galvanized workers to fight for greater health and safety on the job. This has been a year marked by the mass death of “essential workers,” who are simultaneously celebrated for the risks they take to provide goods and services and threatened for raising concerns about their working conditions and inadequate pay. Nevertheless, workers have organized and resisted. HGSU will continue to support essential workers on campus and beyond who have a right to live and work safely.
HGSU is working with the administration for clear communication on all reopening plans going forward, as well as meeting to discuss urgent health and safety matters. Many lab workers began to re-enter their workspaces last summer, and thus we have had to fight to maintain proper safety and health protocols including regular testing for workers. Beyond our own unit, we have been engaged in defensive struggles to ensure that custodial and dining hall workers in 32BJ SEIU and Local 26 Unite Here, respectively, do not suffer job losses. Harvard’s endowment enjoyed a 7.3% return on investment this year despite the doom and gloom projections they offered to justify austerity measures. Shame on Harvard if it fires workers when it is not actually enduring any financial loss.
At the national level, as our local President Brandon Mancilla has observed, the election of Joe Biden as U.S. President opens up new opportunities in labor law and policy for workers to win greater voice and power at the federal and local levels. Whether his administration makes the most of them will depend on how forcefully we and our fellow workers across the country urge him to do so. The presidency of Barack Obama proved that though federal institutions can be friendlier to labor and thus better conditions for academic worker organizing, this in itself does not automatically deliver wins for our movement. What follows are some points that would make Joe Biden a president that champions labor.
First, Joe Biden has the power to appoint pro-labor members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal body that governs private-sector labor law in the United States. It was the NLRB that first recognized student-worker labor rights in 2016, thanks to years of organizing by student-workers at Columbia. But for years now the five-member Board has been controlled by Trump appointees hostile to organized labor in general and grad union rights in particular. Many unions, including ours, have avoided bringing even routine cases to the NLRB for fear that the Board might take the opportunity to undermine our labor rights and the prospects of student workers nationwide. And the Harvard administration knows this–they have hidden behind Trump’s NLRB, delaying and avoiding the enforcement of some contract provisions knowing this NLRB would not compel them to comply. President Biden has the power to rectify this, and while he began to take some steps as soon as he was inaugurated, others will have to wait. He can fill the Board’s current vacancy, but will not be able to appoint a third pro-labor member until August 27, when union-busting lawyer and NLRB member William Emanuel’s term expires. We will be pressuring through our international union’s political power to make this a priority for Biden’s labor and higher education policy. Once the NLRB has a pro-labor majority, it can extinguish the threat to student-worker labor rights, roll back the many anti-labor NLRB decisions of the Trump years, and potentially strengthen labor rights further. You can read more about the details here, but the bottom line is that a pro-labor NLRB is a valuable ally in our efforts to enforce our contract and organize for greater voice and power.
Biden also plans to appoint Boston Mayor Marty Walsh as Secretary of Labor. Walsh is a longtime Biden friend and ally who beat out competitors like California Labor Secretary Julie Su and Michigan U.S. Rep. and former SEIU organizer Andy Levin, among others. Walsh has roots in the labor movement as the former head of the Boston Building Trades Council, but organized labor was split in its endorsements, with different unions supporting Walsh’s, Su’s, and Levin’s respective bids. (The UAW, for instance, had lobbied for Levin.) For now, we can only speculate about what Walsh’s Department of Labor will prioritize and fight for. He may be able to bridge political divisions within the labor movement, but this remains to be seen. Walsh represents a generation of labor that younger, more militant organizers are looking to overcome to achieve a comprehensive social view of organizing. Being pro-labor is not just about raising wages and improving private health insurance plans. It has to be about empowering entire communities and mobilizing political power to address deeply rooted historical inequalities. The inability of the labor movement to successfully challenge deadly economic and public health plans during the pandemic can in part be explained by a lack of vision among labor leadership. As Mayor, Marty Walsh resisted the demands of the Boston Teachers Union, for example, for safer working conditions. Moreover, Marty Walsh’s comfortable relationship with the Boston Police Department and its union (the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association) is troubling given the many demands for reform, defunding, and abolition coming from communities and activists that resist racist police abuse. Tragically, for many labor leaders some workers seem to matter more than others.
Finally, Biden can revive efforts to pass labor law reform, either the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), abandoned under Obama, or the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed in the House of Representatives early in 2020. Both would strengthen U.S. labor law and facilitate organizing efforts in all industries where workers want to form a union, though there are important tradeoffs between them, which you can read about here.
President Biden has an opportunity to deliver on the pro-labor commitments he made during his campaign. But he is more likely to do so when he knows that we and other workers are paying attention, and that we won’t hesitate to use the political voice and labor power we exercise through our unions to push him to do the right thing. That’s why our membership just voted to join other UAW locals calling on Biden to make just labor, immigration, and education policy, including cancelling student debt and rolling back xenophobic Trump measures that have affected our international student members. If you’d like to join efforts like these in the coming months, please contact Brandon Mancilla (hgsu.president@gmail.com) or hgsu.general@gmail.com to get involved with our Solidarity Committee.
