My name is Jack Cordes and I am a G3 in Population Health Sciences representing the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) on your Bargaining Committee (BC).
Tuesday, we had our 9th bargaining session with the University. With the contract expiring on June 30th, we have little time remaining to secure adequate protections for student workers. We will not accept an inadequate offer before the 30th simply to have a contract. Nevertheless, we are still working urgently to move negotiations forward. Thus, we have scheduled 3 additional bargaining dates with the University to bring us to a total of 5 remaining sessions this month before the contract expires.
The main issues discussed on Tuesday can be categorized into two large buckets: economic and non-economic. During the session, the University presented its initial economic proposal.
Harvard’s Economic Proposal:
- The University accepted our change removing the pay disparity for TFs in HSPH. Student workers in HSPH will now be paid on par with student workers across the University!
- The University proposed no raises for this year with one-time bonuses of $1,000, $280 per section, and $140 per section for salaried RAs, Instructional Fellows, and TFs, respectively, who are working in both the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years. As written, the administration’s initial proposal means that if you did not work last year for whatever reason (i.e. you received a fellowship or non-working stipend, or, because you were not an admitted student here yet) you will not receive the bonus.
- Their offer includes 2% raises for all salaried positions to be applied July 1, 2022 and July 1, 2023. Note: the 2022 raise would be applied to your base bay in 2020-2021, not including the bonus. As a result, if you were to receive the bonus next year, your pay would go down the following year.
- Harvard also proposes to raise the minimum hourly compensation to $18, with raises to $18.50 on July 1, 2022 and $19 on July 1, 2023.
While we are very pleased that we have achieved pay equity for HSPH, a longstanding organizing priority for our union, we were disappointed in other aspects of the University’s compensation proposal including lack of parity with peer institutions such as MIT and the lack of acknowledgement about the advancing pace of inflation. The University’s team could not offer a clear answer about how Harvard decides compensation. They repeatedly insisted that they did not consider peer institutions in their offer. Moreover, they admitted that their low offer did not reflect an inability to pay. They acknowledged that the endowment performed exceptionally well (a 7% return) despite the unexpected expenses the University experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a year of remote learning.
With the exception of pay equity for HSPH, the Bargaining Committee does not believe this initial economic proposal is acceptable. We will demand more from the University, especially after knowing the hardships student workers experienced this year and the labor you put in to keep this University running. Solidarity is the key moving forward to secure appropriate compensation.
Non-economic Proposals:
- Course Cancellation: We got the University to move to 40% compensation for TFs whose classes were cancelled as well as access to full benefits for the duration of the appointment period.
- Training: The University continues to reject anti-racism and anti-bias training as part of job training and believes it is adequately addressed elsewhere in the contract and through the establishment of University-wide working groups. We, as a BC, believe that anti-racism training is a critical part of the overall training needed to be able to perform your job well as a student worker and the reactive approach of harassment and discrimination recourse and non-binding working group recommendations are not adequate. The University restructured language regarding the Union’s access to orientations and trainings, which would limit the ability of student workers to learn about their union and their rights under the contract.
Our next bargaining session is Thursday, June 17, 9:00 AM EDT (RSVP Here). We also have sessions coming up on Tuesday, June 22, 3:00 PM EDT; Thursday, June 24, 9:00 AM EDT; Monday, June 28, 11:00 AM EDT; and Wednesday, June 30, 2:00 PM EDT. (You can already RSVP for those sessions too!)
We encourage all our members to attend bargaining sessions because there’s nothing like seeing bargaining with the University in action to truly understand the stern opposition to our basic proposals. Yet, some of the movement on the issues we’ve made this month proves that the pressure you apply by simply being present works. The strength of our membership and your willingness to stand up for the rights you deserve matters now more than ever.
The next few weeks will be very important to understand what we’ll have to fight for the hardest in the event that our contract expires without reaching an agreement. We need you to be a part of these conversations. The contract we will ultimately win is the contract we’re all going to fight for right now. There’s never been a better time to become a member of your union!
In solidarity,
Jack Cordes
