March 2021
Volume 1
Issue 6
Standing with our Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Community
HGSU stands in solidarity with Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in our communities and across the world following the murders of spa workers in Georgia. Racist and sexist discrimination and violence in the workplace are far too common and must be named as such. It is critical that the labor movement call out and fight white supremacy and sexism in the workplace at every turn. Everyone should feel safe at work, and unions must do everything in our power to make sure they do, whether or not a workplace is unionized.
For those of you who are able, we encourage you to donate to the Chinese Progressive Association and the Asian American Resource Workshop to support the local AAPI community and political organizing in Greater Boston. We have proposed that the UAW Massachusetts Community Action Program (CAP) do the same in the coming weeks. You can join the Asian Pacific Islanders Civic Action Network (APIsCAN)’s community town hall on March 25, 2021 6pm-7:30pm, which will highlight how the Asian American community in Massachusetts is organizing against racism. RSVP at bit.ly/townhallaar.
HGSU and the UAW Massachusetts CAP have signed onto APIsCAN’s letter calling for local, state, and federal investment into Asian, Asian American, and Asian Pacific Islander communities. Our elected officials, including US Representative Ayanna Pressley and multiple Boston City Councilors, have joined us in signing this letter and we encourage you to sign on.
Bargaining Goals & Beginnings
Last Tuesday, HGSU opened up the bargaining goals vote for our second contract campaign. All HGSU members received an email and a text notifying them about their ballot. The vote will remain open until Friday, March 19 at 11:59 EST.
Our bargaining goals represent the essence of our contract campaign. They’re a list of ideas, needs, and demands that will guide the bargaining committee in drafting proposals and informing negotiation strategy. Most importantly, the bargaining goals were identified by student workers like you. The BC proposed these bargaining goals based on responses to the bargaining survey, workplace issues and grievances, and insights from thousands of conversations with student workers, meaning these goals reflect what student workers at Harvard need most. Amongst those goals are similar demands from the last contract campaign: neutral third-party grievance procedure for harassment and discrimination cases, annual pay increases and fair wages, dental insurance at no additional cost, pay equity for student workers at the Harvard School of Public Health, and more. You can read the full list of goals you helped to identify here. The bargaining committee is excited to move forward with these proposed goals at the bargaining table.
Tomorrow, March 18, we sit down virtually with Harvard’s bargaining team for the first time since ratifying our initial contract. Since we filed our notice of intent to bargain in February, the bargaining committee has been working diligently to craft proposals and improvements to our contract. The monumental shift in national attitude toward organized labor empowers us to move forward to secure a better and stronger contract for all student workers at Harvard. With the guidance of our bargaining goals, we express high hopes and expectations for negotiations. Be on the lookout for our second bargaining update after this first meeting at the virtual bargaining table.
HGSU stewards advocate for student workers to be paid on time and in full
Hans Pech, Germanic Languages and Literatures Steward
Several students in my department—Germanic Languages and Literatures (GLL)—have yet to be paid for their work this semester. Student workers who are working from abroad, who left the US for their own safety and haven’t returned for the safety of our community, have experienced pay delays and in some cases have seen their pay reduced due to transfer and other fees. In GLL, these issues center around the third-party payroll company the Harvard Administration has contracted. The company has lost at least one signed contract, is often unresponsive, and gives student workers the runaround. As a result, several student workers are still waiting for their entire pay since January, and at least one student had to seek a personal loan to make up for their lost income. Our department administration is trying its best to solve these issues, but Harvard evidently didn’t provide them with the resources or support necessary to address problems that should not be individual departments’ responsibility in the first place.
To remedy this failure to pay students on time and what they were promised, we’ve started to take action through our union. We have taken cases to the Contract Enforcement and Education Committee (CEEC), who has alerted university to the fact that students are not being paid in a timely manner. We drafted a faculty petition calling on the Harvard administration to immediately pay students. And we have made sure that other students across the university know that they deserve to be paid what they’re due and to encourage them to let their union know—if you’re experiencing this issue, you can report it to CEEC at this confidential form.
Every worker deserves timely and adequate remuneration for their work. The Harvard Administration had almost a year to set up a process guaranteeing this for its many workers working from abroad. Graduate students shouldn’t have to bear the cost of the administration’s failure to facilitate a smooth transition to a third party payroll company. Harvard paid students working abroad in a timely way this fall. They should do so once again.
Completion of first 6-month audit of HGSU’s finances by Trustees
HGSU’s three elected Trustees (Emily Wright, Melanie Rucinski, Andrew Bergman) have completed the first 6-month audit of HGSU’s finances, as required by both our bylaws and the UAW International Constitution. Membership dues are a critical collectively controlled resource that fund and help power much of the work we do to meet our collective goals. Making sure that our Local properly documents income & expenditures is critical to ensuring that our membership dues are doing the work they are supposed to be doing to build our power and improve working conditions for student workers.
Read the Trustee’s brief report about the audit here. If you have any questions about the process used for this audit, feel free to reach out to us at hgsu.trustees@gmail.com. You can also get in touch if you want to support our collective power by joining our Governance and Participation Committee.
Student workers at HSPH speak out for union access
HGSU is working to address the removal of student workers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) from our bargaining unit. We have an ongoing grievance related to the removal of students workers doing teaching labor in the Population Health Sciences (PHS) program. And, recently, we have learned that student workers doing research work in the Biostatistics program are also being removed from the lists of workers covered by our contract. These removals harm student workers teaching and researching in the field of public health in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, depriving them of all of the rights, protections, and benefits they are guaranteed under our contract, including access to union representation, our grievance procedure, and our multiple benefits funds. Hear from a student worker in Biostatistics at HSPH, Stephanie Wu:
As researchers, we are an integral part of what the university produces. As graduate student researchers, we are an integral part of the research pipeline. I have the opportunity to work with the WHO to help countries monitor HIV drug resistance, and I know many others who are working on research to improve COVID-19 relief and address health disparities. Unfortunately, it can be hard to navigate the power dynamics of a research relationship. Student researchers can be especially vulnerable to issues such as harassment, discrimination, and bullying (being overworked, uncredited, or professionally belittled). The positive relationship I have with my advisor and collaborators is a crucial part of my ability to do my research, which is why I want to ensure that student researchers are recognized as workers and so can access the protections and benefits our union has fought hard to secure. If things do go wrong, student workers must be able to access contractual recourse and obtain protections without fear of retaliation.
Labor Links
At Harvard and Around Boston
- BC member Ash Tomaszewski wrote a thorough and informative update on how personnel changes at the National Labor Relations Board will affect student worker organizing.
- 800 nurses in Worcester, MA, are striking over furloughs and dangerously low staffing levels at St. Vincent Hospital.
- About 100 Mass MoCA museum workers in North Adams, MA, have joined UAW Local 2110 and have filed for an election with the NLRB.
- The UMass Lowell Labor Education Program, which fosters research and curriculum in labor studies and offers extension courses for working people, was in danger of disappearing. But a successful pressure campaign has restored staffing and support to the program.
Across the Country
Photo: Rommel Nunezg, @rommelnunezg
- Four years after winning recognition, two years after beginning bargaining, and fifteen months after our own strike, the student workers of Columbia University are striking for a strong contract. Stonewalling from the administration has prevented them from reaching a tentative agreement, and in response to the strike, the administration has threatened to dock pay from workers who fail to work and to report that work to the university. You can support the strikers by joining their digital or in-person pickets and donating to their strike fund.
- On March 9, the US House of Representatives passed the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, the most significant labor rights legislation in decades. The act contains many provisions, including overriding right-to-work laws, strengthening penalties against employers who violate labor law, and making it easier for new unions to reach a first contract. Passage in the Senate is unlikely without reforming or abolishing the filibuster.
- Voting continues in the union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, with the vote set to wrap up at the end of March. Amazon continues to run its anti-union campaign, while on March 1 President Biden released a video condemning anti-union tactics from the boss and endorsing workers’ right to vote without pressure or interference.
- The management at Tate’s Bake Shop has threatened an illegal and particularly heinous union-busting technique: securing the deportation of undocumented workers, a majority of its workforce. Workers are voting in a representation election until April 21.
- The New Republic reported on the heavily contested process of school reopenings, and how school employees’ fight for safe working and learning conditions is often misrepresented and ignored.
Around the World
- The Guardian reported that over 6500 South Asian migrant workers have died in Qatar over the last decade, since the country began preparing to host the 2022 World Cup. Qatar does not dispute this figure.
- In India, the farmers’ revolt against agricultural deregulation continues: March 6 marked its 100th day. Demonstrations and encampments persist as talks with the government remain deadlocked, all in the wake of new government controls on social media and arrests of some critics and protestors. For more on the history, political economy, and class and caste dimensions of this protest, check out this essay by Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. candidate Aditya Bahl.
