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Harvard University said Tuesday that it will honor the results of the recent graduate student union election and engage in collective bargaining with the new United Auto Workers-affiliated chapter. Provost Alan M. Garber said in an all-campus email that “in light of the outcome of the vote and the existing [National Labor Relations Board] precedent, Harvard is prepared to begin good-faith negotiations, guided by our fundamental commitments as an academic institution.”
Harvard’s graduate student union will represent some 5,000 teaching and research assistants on campus. Notable for its large size, the chapter is also one of the few graduate student unions on private campuses to be recognized by its administration following a 2016 NLRB decision saying that graduate students on private campus are workers entitled to collective bargaining. A group of other private institutions have since said they won’t engage in collective bargaining on the grounds that students are students and not workers, in their view. They’ve also been hopeful that the Trump-era NLRB will overturn the precedent allowing students at private institutions to unionize.
“We applaud Harvard for doing the right thing and honoring the results of our majority vote in favor of a union,” Justin Bloesch, a Ph.D. candidate in economics, said in a statement. “We look forward to negotiating with them in good faith – and making progress on issues like sexual harassment and assault, improved conditions for international workers, predictable workloads, compensation and more.”
