Dear faculty members,

As we near the strike deadline the Union has given the University, we will be offering more frequent updates to those who have joined the HGSU strike community updates list. For now, I am writing to share a brief update from HGSU contract negotiations, as faculty play an important role in what happens next.

Across last Thursday’s (4/9) bargaining session and yesterday’s (4/13) short, one hour session with the Harvard administration, we saw the most movement we’ve seen in some time: Harvard engaged in productive conversations regarding several articles, and we reached agreement on an article concerning holidays/vacation days. Per labor law, the University and the Union’s Bargaining Committees are considered equals at the table, so we are excited to see the University begin to recognize the demands of our workers — this is, in no small part, thanks to the attention and support you all have given us over the past two weeks.  

However, we found the University’s response to our proposal on non-citizen worker rights deeply concerning. After sitting on language voted by our majority-international workers for ten months, they rejected virtually everything we put forward, including proposals that would allow non-citizen workers financial support in cases of detention/deportation, a path for continuing their work if immigration emergencies arose, and a commitment to only allow ICE on campus with proper legal process. When we first presented these proposals, we had several non-citizen workers come testify to the importance of these proposals to their lives in these moments of federal attacks and heightened precarity. Clearly, their testimonials have gone unconsidered. 

We still have twenty-three (23) articles outstanding, and have yet to reach meaningful progress on our membership’s core issues of compensation and benefits, harassment and discrimination protections, union security, and non-citizen worker rights, which we wrote about in our previous emails to you. In other words, there has been progress in pace, but not yet in substance where it matters most. 

As you know, our membership recently voted by an overwhelming margin—96%—to authorize a strike. We have now announced a strike deadline of April 21, 2026, which means that if we do not reach a fair contract by that date, we will strike. We remain committed to bargaining in good faith to reach an agreement before that date, and during any potential strike. We have indicated to the University that we are available at any point to negotiate over our contract; we have not yet heard back, however, about any new bargaining dates from them before the strike deadline. 

In order to avoid a strike, we need your help. You can show your support today by: 

• Signing our statement of solidarity, written in conjunction with our comrades in the Harvard Academic Workers Union, committing to not replace the labor of your striking workers by hiring replacement workers or retaliating against them. Replacing labor for teaching, grading, or research responsibilities may seem like a way to preserve continuity. However, replacing labor ultimately undercuts workers’ ability to resolve disputes and will likely prolong any possible strike. Moreover, external hires are unable to provide your students with the high-caliber, personalized feedback that we can.
• Using this email template to encourage Harvard to take immediate action. Share this statement of solidarity and email template widely with your faculty colleagues. 
• Donating to our hardship fund. If you are not in a managerial or executive position, consider donating to our hardship fund! Hosted by Boston DSA, this fund will assist our most vulnerable union members, including student workers with disabilities and dependents, in the event of a strike. Any unused proceeds will be donated. 

We know that Harvard has asked you to begin preparing for a strike. In the event of a strike, we will ask you to fight alongside us for a more just academic environment by:

• • Refusing to replace the labor of striking student workers. 

• Refraining from compiling or sharing lists of striking students. Such actions can create risk—particularly for international students—and may be used to discourage participation in protected collective activity.

• Respecting the picket line. Make your support visible by either canceling your lectures or hosting them in alternative locations, such as Zoom or outdoors, if pickets are outside your building.
• Joining us at our picket, where we will hold daily teach-ins for you and your undergraduate students as well as community events such as community lunches and art builds. You will be able to find our Picket Events List on our website and Instagram, in the event of a strike. 
• Staying informed. Open communication across roles is critical in moments like this. We commit to sending you information as the strike nears and with further developments, and encourage you to reach out with any and all questions you may have. If you would like to receive more regular updates and ways to support further, please join our community updates listserv. 

Faculty and student workers ultimately share an interest in strong classrooms, stable research environments, and a university that can sustain both. The more quickly we reach a fair agreement, the sooner we can all return our full attention to that shared work. 

If you would like more information on how contract negotiations have gone, or how you can support the union in achieving a fair contract, please reach out to [email protected] and one of our organizers will be in contact. 

In solidarity,

Sara Speller
Ph.D Candidate and Teaching Fellow, Harvard University Music Department
President, HGSU-UAW Local 5118 
[email protected]

Dear faculty members,

I write to you with an update from the Harvard Graduate Students’ Union (HGSU). In my last email (which you can read here), I explained that HGSU was opening a Strike Authorization Vote (SAV). Upon polls closing, 2052 members voted, with a 95.8% majority authorizing a strike. We kept the vote open for nearly a full month because our membership takes the consequences of a strike very seriously: we wanted to take time and ensure each member was fully informed. Hundreds of graduate students volunteered to educate others, and we believe this reflects the frustration of student-workers. With that in mind, it is important to remember the following points:

HGSU has two goals for this contract: adequate protections and adequate pay for all student-workers. Many of you have watched us, your students, suffer without a true grievance procedure that protects against harassment, discrimination, retaliation and the erosion of academic free speech protections. Grievability of these issues is commonplace in virtually all other collective bargaining agreements but is refused to us by the Administration. It has needlessly perpetuated an environment where we are unable to live, think and act freely as scholars and workers.

Further, we are pushing for livable wages and pay equity across our Union. It is indefensible that workers at this University are making so little money that they are engaging in under the table jobs, and going to the survival shelter. We were told it was ridiculous to ask for meaningful wage increases at a time like this, but it’s even more ridiculous that many of us are making $26,300, qualifying us for food stamps (in 2026, in Boston, at Harvard).

As a reminder, our contract proposals, demands, and bargaining summaries are always available to you through our bargaining portal, which you can read here. Despite our efforts, the University seems uninterested in critically engaging with the needs of our unit. After 20 bargaining sessions and nearly sixty hours at the table, the University and the Union have only agreed to a single article with around twenty-five (25) articles still outstanding. The Administration, after over nine months, has failed to provide even an initial response to our Non-Citizen Worker Rights proposal, one of the Union’s most important priorities and has left other articles without even an initial response for nearly a year. 

We are not going on strike immediately. At some point this month, we will issue a deadline to the university, and continue to bargain in good faith in the hopes of reaching an agreement before the deadline. If the strike deadline is reached without adequate progress at the table and a path to agreement, we will launch our strike.

A strike can still be avoided.  In fact, our members consider a strike the least attractive option, only to be taken after long and concerted efforts to reach agreements through good-faith bargaining. We are active participants in the Harvard Community. We believe that there is tremendous public value in the pioneering research and teaching standards that make our institution so renowned, and we find personal fulfillment in contributing to this research and teaching at Harvard. We do not want to pause the meaningful labor that we all do, but we are prepared to do so if it is the only way that the University administration will engage with our priority demands. 

Here’s how you can help your student-workers. First, urge Harvard Administration to engage with us at the table to avoid a strike. Remind the university that your student-workers are simply demanding a safer, more dignified workplace with the ability to live in the greater Boston area without the threat of poverty; our demands are reasonable and meant to help student-workers be more productive and perform at a high standard. If it is useful, you can work off of this template. Second, stay in the know about strike deadlines, picket lines and more by signing up here. This will allow you to continue receiving direct updates from the Union, including information on how you can support our bargaining efforts. 

We understand that Harvard administrators have written to you about how to best prepare for a strike. We think this is premature, as Harvard administration still has the ability to stop a strike if it so wishes. And in any case, we do not think that the burden of a strike should fall on faculty, as the University has proposed it should. We remain hopeful that the administration will begin meaningfully bargaining with us after a year of surface negotiations. In the coming weeks we will engage with any faculty that has questions, thoughts or concerns over the progress of negotiations. We are working hard to convince the University that a strike is not a foregone conclusion, but if we do reach that point please consider:

In case of a strike, avoid covering the work of striking students. While we understand the desire to not interrupt student’s semester and ongoing research projects (and share this desire, as teaching and research is what we have also devoted our lives to), ultimately our working conditions are students’ learning conditions as well as our institution’s research conditions.  Adequate pay and grievability of workplace issues will ensure that these conditions meet the standards of excellence we all seek and are what we need now. Covering the work of striking students undermines your students’ ability to fight for the rights and benefits they need, and may also prolong the strike as it will take longer for the University to feel they need to settle a contract. To our knowledge, faculty have not previously faced any repercussions for refusing to cover the work of striking students, which has happened often in previous strikes across higher education. 

Commit to not reporting striking students during a strike. The University has, during previous strike actions, asked faculty to report striking students so that they can intimidate our workers into not striking. Reporting striking students undermines the strike but creating and sending such lists to the administration also risks international students at this moment of heightened precarity. Domestic students may also be targeted if such lists were created and then requested by the federal government, so it is safest to not compile such lists to begin with. To our knowledge, faculty have not previously faced any repercussions for not reporting their striking students, which has also happened often in previous strikes.

Sign up here to continue receiving more updates from the Union, and additional information on how you can support our bargaining efforts. 

I appreciate the faculty that have already reached out to us with meaningful questions and words of support. We are watching this University, in real time, become something different than what it claims to be, and it harms us both individually and as a whole. However, we must have the temerity to demand more from an institution that is capable of meeting that demand. We hope you will join and support us in this and will send more information as things progress.  

Solidarity always,
Sara Speller
Ph.D Candidate and Teaching Fellow, Harvard University Music Department
President, HGSU-UAW Local 5118 
[email protected]

Dear faculty members,

This morning, the Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) announced the  opening of a strike authorization vote (SAV) to begin tomorrow, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. As the president of the Union, I write to further explain how the academic student-workers of this institution came to this decision, as well as how you can help diminish the need for strike action. 

First, I want to express that strike escalation is a decision we take very seriously. A SAV is not a strike itself; it simply authorizes our Bargaining Committee to call one if needed. As a teaching Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I speak with certainty when I say teaching and research is of the utmost importance for each and every one of our student-workers. We remain committed to securing a fair agreement through negotiations to avoid a potential strike.

Over the past year of bargaining, however, our members have grown frustrated by the progress we have seen at the table. It is this lack of movement that has led us to ask our membership to vote on strike authorization. We hope that the Harvard community will help us encourage the Corporation to reach an agreement with our proposals, all of which take into account the uncertainty of both employees and the employer during these unprecedented times. The main pillars of our proposed contract, all of which have been democratically decided by our membership, are:

1. Compensation and benefits. PhD students on research salaries currently receive a stipend of $50K. Teaching salaries are even less, at approximately $13,150 per semester for a standard course load. These wages have not kept pace with inflation and, in real terms, we’ve taken a large pay cut since our last contract in 2021. We currently make significantly less than a living wage in the Boston area, a burden that falls disproportionately on parents, disabled workers, and first-generation students that may be supporting their families with their stipend. Student workers at peer institutions including MIT, Cornell, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale receive more pay for their research and teaching than our members. We are asking for a stipend of $55K, raises tied to the rate of inflation over the duration of our contract, and an increase in our benefit funds to cover needed expenses. Student-workers deserve to be paid enough to live in the city where we study and work, and we need these wages to keep pace with inflation. 
2. Harassment and discrimination protections. Since the founding of our union in 2018, our workers have highlighted serious shortcomings in Harvard’s protections against harassment and discrimination at work. Harvard’s processes force graduate students to wait for Harvard to investigate itself, rather than allowing graduate students to choose whether they’d like their case to be handled by Harvard, an independent arbitrator for fairer outcomes towards both parties, or both. This process is also cost-prohibitive, with some workers paying $40,000 for legal representation in a single harassment case. We are fighting for access to our grievance process so that our workers have the choice in which process they engage to address their concerns. This protection is standard across other student worker unions, including MIT, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and NYU. Multiple other Harvard unions also have such provisions in their contract, but despite years of asking the University for such a process, graduate student workers still only have recourse through University measures. 
3. Expanded protections for non-citizen student workers. The events of the last year have been indescribably disruptive and terrifying for our non-citizen community members at Harvard. We are asking for expanded legal and financial support for immigration issues, commitments to non-collaboration with federal immigration enforcement, and paid leave for immigration appointments, among other provisions for the protection of non-citizen students and workers. 
4. A “Fair Share” Fee, aka Agency Shop. As things stand, all student workers receive the protections and gains we’ve won in past contracts, but only dues-paying members fund the work to negotiate and enforce that agreement. Enforcing the contract – pursuing grievances, addressing violations, and going up against anti-labor lawyers retained by Harvard – requires real resources. Agency shop provisions provide a choice for workers to become members and pay dues or pay agency fees to the Union. These provisions  ensure that everyone who benefits from our union contract helps sustain it, and are standard in student worker contracts at MIT, Yale, UPenn, and Cornell, as well as in Harvard’s campus unions like Local 26 (representing dining hall workers) and 32BJ (representing the janitorial workers and security guards). By opposing this proposal, Harvard keeps our union less able to fully protect the workers we represent.

These provisions are necessary for graduate students at Harvard to live safely and comfortably, and to be effective teachers and researchers, for the duration of their programs at this institution. Despite this fact, after over a year of bargaining, the Harvard administration has not moved on any of these contract items. For example, HGSU’s elected Bargaining Committee passed the University our proposal for Non-Citizen Worker Rights in June 2025; nine months later, we still have yet to receive any response from the University’s team on the article. Our proposal to expand harassment and discrimination protections was met with a University counter-proposal worse than our current contract language, taking away existing access to union representation and taking away explicit protections on the basis of protected categories (see Boston Globe coverage here). We are eager to hear the University’s responses to our compensation articles, but the University has unfortunately only offered a limited number of sessions over the remainder of the semester. And it is important to note that while we understand the financial difficulties the University has faced in the last year, there’s strong evidence that Harvard can afford the basic rights and protections that many of our peer institutions already have in place. Moreover, the slashing of graduate admissions in nearly every School presents another challenge: with a smaller graduate workforce, the teaching and research of graduate students will be even more vital to the academic integrity of our institution. 

For these reasons, we have made the difficult decision to call on our membership to vote to authorize strike action. We encourage all community members at Harvard to communicate the importance of these issues to the Harvard administration, in the hopes that movement at the bargaining table can mitigate the need for a strike. It is likely that the University will also soon write to you with their perspective, as is their right. But we would like to strongly encourage you to reach out to the workers actually impacted by the lack of these workplace rights and protections or to our organizers directly so that you have the full picture in front of you. We also suggest reaching out to the Dean of your school and asking for them to further advocate for the students working in our labs, classrooms, and academic projects. 

In closing, we believe our interests align with those of the University’s: lasting excellence in the teaching of our students and the continuation of groundbreaking research in our academic fields. As the next generation of professors and scholars, the members of this union see our professional fates as intimately tied with the wellbeing of our academic institutions. In order to ensure long term stability of the university, we must ensure the immediate stability of its vulnerable workers. 

If you would like more information on how contract negotiations have gone, or how you can support the union in achieving a fair contract, please reach out to [email protected] and one of our organizers will be in contact. 

In solidarity,
Sara Speller
Ph.D Candidate and Teaching Fellow, Harvard University Music Department
President, HGSU-UAW Local 5118 
[email protected]