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The Harvard Law Record

Independent at Harvard Law School since 1946

Letter

Why We’re on Strike

Photo by Czapp Árpád on Pexels.
By Denish Jaswal

To the Editor: 

I am a PhD candidate in philosophy and president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118). I have organized with our union since 2018 and was elected president this May. HGSU represents over 4,000 student workers across Harvard University. At Harvard Law School, HGSU represents over 500 workers, including teaching assistants, hourly research assistants, and members of the Board of Student Advisers. Starting today, these workers, alongside thousands of union siblings, ceased all job-related duties and joined our picket line to fight for a fair contract. 

For 20 months, we have been negotiating for safe work, fair pay, and the right to stay. This means wages that keep pace with inflation and peer institutions, and an end to paying some teachers only $26,000 when others with the same workload make almost double. It means real, enforceable pathways of recourse against harassment and discrimination. And it means having resources, flexibility, and stronger protections for non-citizen student workers. 

Progress on these issues is critical for student workers to have the support needed to live and perform world-class teaching and research. In response to our proposals, the University has refused to meaningfully engage at the table. It has, in fact, offered us a regressive contract worse than our last, stripping away millions in previously negotiated benefit funds and removing standard codification of protected classes from our contract. It has also resorted to anti-labor tactics, threatening that our strike may be “intermittent” and thus unprotected — a claim we reject, and one that HLS professors Benjamin Sachs, Sharon Block, and Laura Weinrib have called a misinterpretation of existing law. 

The University’s administration has engaged in similar bad-faith tactics with other unions currently bargaining. The Harvard Academic Workers Union (HAW), which represents about 2,500 teachers and researchers as well as HLS clinical staff, has set a strike date of Nov. 10 for its teachers and researchers unit. UNITE HERE Local 26, which represents dining hall workers, authorized a strike last week. It’s no coincidence that three separate labor unions are being pushed to strike by this administration. 

None of us want to be on strike — we came here because we love our teaching and research. But the University has responded to little else. We will be on strike until we reach a fair contract, and we ask the Harvard Law community to stand with us.

Denish Jaswal
President, Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118)