Longwood Strikers Join Cambridge Walkout as Graduate Workers Picket HMS Quad

BOSTON — More than 40 graduate workers picketed the Harvard Medical School quad Tuesday, bringing the third HGSU-UAW strike to Longwood.

Chants echoed across the HMS lawn throughout the morning.

“Harvard, Harvard, crying poor — what’s that big endowment for?” workers called out. They also issued a sharper rebuke of federal immigration enforcement, calling for “no collusion with the feds.”

Sudipta Saha, vice president of HGSU-UAW and a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Harvard School of Public Health, said Longwood represents a core constituency of the striking unit.

“Longwood is a major part where many of the workers of the union work, especially in the labs, in the medical sciences, and also in the School of Public Health,” Saha said. “Those are some of our most active parts of the unit. And so energy’s been really high.”

For some, Tuesday marked an opportunity to assert Longwood’s place within a union often associated with its Cambridge counterpart. Laura Y. Chen, a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the picket carried particular meaning for workers on the medical campus.

“I think oftentimes people feel like we’re a separate campus and not super involved, so it’s been good to build a robust system of support here,” Chen said.

Chen added that ongoing NIH funding cuts have sharpened the sense of urgency among Longwood workers.

“That’s been really galvanizing for folks as well,” she said.