Why We Strike

We are teachers, researchers, and students. Harvard works because we do. After 14 frustrating months at the bargaining table, we have been left with no choice but to strike.

Members of the Harvard community received an email last Friday from Provost John F. Manning ’82 and Executive Vice President Meredith L. Weenick ’90, offering the first University-wide communication on contract negotiations since bargaining began with the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers over a year ago. It arrived four days before our strike deadline — and did nothing to address our demands for common-sense change.

We lead Harvard’s graduate student union. Last month, 2,052 of our members voted on a motion to authorize a strike, with 95.8 percent in favor. Today — after 24 bargaining sessions yielded little movement from the University on the union’s key issues, and no response to eight articles in our contract, including those governing benefit funds that could help graduate workers pay for healthcare, childcare, and emergencies — we began our strike.

More HGSU members voted to authorize this strike than backed the vote that secured our last contract in 2021. This is despite lower overall membership, after the University announced it would remove over 800 graduate students in research positions from our union just one day after that contract expired in June 2025.

The decision to strike is not one that is taken lightly. Graduate student compensation leaves little room for savings to fall back on if the University halts our paychecks during the strike. We also know the costs of a strike are more than financial. We chose to pursue graduate studies at Harvard because of our commitment to research and teaching. A strike threatens the research we have poured hundreds of hours into and the mentorship we depend on from our faculty advisers.

Among the most important costs we have had to consider, though, is the impact a strike will have on our students.

We hope our students can understand what we are striking for. We are fighting not only to obtain protections commensurate with our colleagues at peer institutions, but also to preserve provisions the University agreed to in the past and now wants to rescind.

We are striking because Harvard has refused to accept our requests for basic workplace protections against harassment, discrimination, and bullying.

We asked for independent arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination, consistent with the grievance processes offered to graduate student workers at New York University, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University. The University countered by not only rejecting this request, but also seeking to remove language from our prior contract promising to notify the union about Title IX policy changes and explicitly listing protected identity categories.

We are striking because the University has rejected our proposed, basic protections for our non-citizen members.

Non-citizen students and academic workers have been targeted, detained, and stripped of their visas on campuses across the country. We are asking Harvard to restrict immigration enforcement agents from accessing non-public spaces without a signed judicial warrant and that the University fund legal counsel for non-citizen workers facing arbitrary detention and visa revocations. Despite publicly touting the vital contributions of our non-citizen students and promising to protect them, Harvard has refused to codify these commitments.

We are striking because our compensation often cannot cover the cost of living.

Many teaching fellows who teach four sections a year earn $26,300 annually. We are asking for contractually protected wages comparable with what graduate workers at peer institutions like MIT, Princeton University, and Stanford make — a simple ask that the University disingenuously characterizes as a request for a 74 percent raise.

Harvard’s representation of our income includes tuition fees that the University itself sets and pays itself before any money reaches our bank accounts. It also includes stipends that some students receive, but those are unprotected by the union contract and determined entirely at Harvard’s discretion. Harvard’s counterproposal is a roughly 2.5 percent annual raise applied to current salaries — a rate that inflation has exceeded in each of the past four years.

We cannot fulfill our responsibilities as researchers, scholars, and teachers if we face harassment with no real recourse, if we fear arbitrary detention in our own workplace, and if we cannot afford to live here. We are striking for conditions that would allow us to better dedicate ourselves to the work that we came to Harvard to do — the work that helps make Harvard great.

To our students, we hope you can understand why we choose to strike. Until a fair contract is reached, you can still find us on the picket line, holding events, and continuing to advocate for our Harvard community. Know that we would rather be in our labs, our offices, and our classrooms.

The sooner Harvard takes our demands seriously, the sooner we can all get back to work.

Laura Chen is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Population Health Sciences and a Harvard Graduate Students Union steward. Denish K. Jaswal is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and a member of the HGSU’s bargaining committee. Sara V. Speller is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Music and the president of the HGSU.