Don’t Cross the Picket Line, Join It

As of April 21, the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers is on strike. After more than 15 months of contract negotiations, Harvard is refusing to engage with several of the union’s core demands.

HGSU-UAW is demanding more robust protections for non-citizen workers, for wages adjusted to inflation and the cost of living, and for real recourse against harassment and discrimination.

HGSU-UAW’s strike disrupts the normal academic functioning of the University — but this disruption is necessary to bolster the very foundation for their essential academic labor.

The workplaces of our teaching fellows, course assistants, and research assistants are our classrooms. As undergraduates, we also benefit from safe and equitable academic environments in which workers are fairly compensated for the value of their labor.

We must show HGSU-UAW and its members our complete support throughout the duration of this strike.

Naturally, many undergraduates may have reservations about what the strike will mean for us as students, particularly this late in the semester. As student workers cancel their sections and office hours and fill picket lines outside academic buildings, Harvard’s administration will invariably capitalize off undergraduates’ unanswered questions to sow doubt about the strike.

In an email the Friday before the strike deadline, Provost John F. Manning ’82 said Harvard is committed to engaging with HGSU-UAW in good faith. An undergraduate unfamiliar with the inner details of the contract negotiations might take him at his word — and see HGSU-UAW as unreasonable, impatient, even petulant for striking.

As undergraduate students, we owe it to our community to educate ourselves about HGSU-UAW’s demands and the progression of its negotiations with Harvard.

Strikes are a legal right and proven tactic for organized labor to wrench material wins from employers. Here at Harvard, HGSU-UAW’s 29-day strike in December 2019 forced Harvard’s hand after a year and a half of bargaining, helping to bring about the union’s first contract in June 2020, which was ratified resoundingly by 97 percent of its membership.

Today, HGSU-UAW is similarly positioned to catalyze a strong contract for its workers.

After 24 bargaining sessions with HGSU-UAW, Harvard continues to drag its feet on demands that are, in honesty, basic in comparison to what peer institutions already offer, let alone what it truly owes its workers.

HGSU-UAW is demanding base wages of $55,000 annually and $25 hourly. MIT estimates that a graduate student living in a 1-bedroom apartment in Cambridge would pay $32,256 per year for housing. This means that the base wage Harvard won’t give its student workers would still leave many rent-burdened, that is, paying more than 3o percent of their wage on rent.

Harvard has even demonstrated its awareness that the wages it pays — as the wealthiest university in the world — are inadequate for the current cost of living crisis in Boston. In 2023, the University hosted an event — brandishing the tagline “fuel your body & stock your pantry” — which encouraged graduate students to sign up for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.

Clearly, the University does recognize, as the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers puts it, that workers “can’t eat prestige.”

The University continually shirks its responsibility to address the reality that it has created for its workers, an act of duplicity worthy of sustained action by students, graduate and undergraduate alike.

HGSU-UAW’s current campaign further advocates for critical protections for non-citizen workers. The protections would be a line of defense against the U.S. deportation machine, weaponized by the Trump administration to revoke thousands of international students’ visas and target those suspected of involvement in campus movements for Palestine.

Harvard and President Garber have basked in national praise for “standing up” for its international community members in the face of the Trump administration’s shakedown.

Yet behind closed doors and in bargaining sessions, Harvard fails to adopt measures that would tangibly protect those same students and workers. HGSU-UAW is demanding paid days off for immigration appointments or detention, and that Harvard would prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement from entering campus without a judicial warrant. When the union presented counters on non-citizen protections in bargaining last Monday, the University didn’t respond.

Undergraduates can stand in solidarity with HGSU-UAW members by joining the picket lines across campus, creating a consistent presence outside workplaces to demonstrate collective power and popular support. At the Science Center plaza picket, HGSU-UAW also hosts events like teach-ins, rallies, and community lunches, utilizing the picket as a space for education and relationship-building.

Further, undergraduates can also prevent crossing HGSU-UAW’s picket lines by requesting our teaching staff to cancel course meetings, or shift them to Zoom, outside, or even to the picket line. We can reach out to HGSU-UAW members we know to tell them that we support their choice to strike.

Undergraduates interested in further campus organizing can join the Student Labor Action Movement, which produced and distributed over 1,000 informative zines before the strike began. SLAM will continue to uplift workers’ demands throughout the strike.

In the coming days and weeks, you may feel that the strike poses inconveniences to your coursework. Consider, however, that our teaching staff are making real sacrifices because they want to better our collective education.

The union is negotiating with an immensely obstinate employer — and one with a nearly $57 billion endowment at that.

But the reality is that there would be no Harvard endowment — and certainty no Harvard — without its workers. We should all stand in solidarity with them.

Clarification: April 29, 2026

This article has been updated to clarify that HGSU-UAW is demanding both a base wage of $55,000 annually, as well as a base wage of $25 per hour for hourly workers.

Olivia G. Pasquerella ’26 is a Social Studies and Philosophy concentrator in the Dudley Co-Op. They are a member of the Student Labor Action Movement.