Bargaining Portal

We deserve safety and real recourse. 1 in 5 student workers reports harassment, discrimination, or bullying at work. Yet Harvard controls the process from beginning to end, investigating itself and deciding whether harm occurred. Other union workers at Harvard, and graduate workers at dozens of peer institutions, including MIT, Yale, UPenn, and Stanford, already have these protections. Harvard still refuses them to us.

We’re fighting for:

• A free, independent grievance process decided by a neutral third party
• Legal support for Title IX cases, which can cost workers $40k+
• Guaranteed transition funding so RAs can leave unsafe labs without losing their income
• Protections written into our contract, where Harvard can’t quietly erase them

Harvard has only agreed to work on a limited transition fund for PhD RAs, and wants to keep it outside our legally binding contract. It has agreed to none of these other protections.

We need wages we can live on. We live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, and a majority of our co-workers are rent-burdened. Parents struggle with childcare costs of over $23,800 every year, and many of us have to take on multiple jobs to make ends meet. We’re fighting for:

• A living wage: $55k for salaried RAs, prorated for 10mo TF contracts (~45k)
• Pay parity: despite working the same hours, Harvard decides to pay RAs nearly double what they pay TFs
• 3% raises or annual cost-of-living adjustments, whichever is higher, because we can’t see our salaries stretch less far every year

Across the board, Harvard rejected cost-of-living protections for all workers. And instead of equal pay, they offered our lowest-paid workers a meager raise from $26k to $31,362 by 2030.

We need benefits we can actually use. In our last contract, we won nearly $3 million in benefit funds to help workers cover childcare, dental, healthcare, emergency, and non-citizen worker expenses, plus the ability to file a grievance when unfairly denied. Harvard’s latest plan eliminates our benefit funds and gives the university total control over eligibility and denied claims, allowing it to promise millions while we may never see a dollar. Harvard’s new plan would:

• Exclude non-PhD and hourly workers
• Eliminate healthcare, dental, and disability reimbursements
• Cut thousands of dollars in support for parents
• Gut critical support for non-citizen workers
• Give Harvard total control, with no way for our union to challenge denied claims

Harvard runs on the labor of our non-citizen workers. At Columbia, non-citizen workers’ biggest fears became a reality. Federal agents searched student rooms, arrested a green-card-holding recent graduate at university housing, revoked another student’s visa, and later entered a Columbia residential building without a warrant. Harvard would not be what it is without our non-citizen co-workers. Yet our co-workers have already been stopped at the border, stranded abroad for weeks as travel restrictions changed, and left to wonder what stands between them and what happened at Columbia.

As federal attacks escalate, we’re fighting for protections our workers can actually enforce:

• Keep sensitive immigration documents secure
• Guaranteed leave for workers facing visa delays, detention, or other immigration crises
• Notify our union if ICE comes to campus and require a judicial warrant before cooperating

Harvard has rejected these proposals and refused to meaningfully engage.