To the Editor:

For more than a year and a half we have been building our union, HGSU-UAW. We have had thousands of conversations with student workers from across Harvard. With our union, we can stand together to protect what we have and to win improvements to compensation, health and dental care, mental health, child care, protections from discrimination and sexual harassment, workload protections, job security, and a fair grievance procedure. We are voting yes to unionization.

Now more than ever, the future of higher education is at stake. We can expect Congress to attempt to cut federal research funding and the safety nets that protect all workers. Xenophobic acts and the threat of deportations make it all the more critical that we come together to protect each other. By joining with tens of thousands of academic workers across the country and hundreds of thousands of members of the UAW, we can work to protect STEM funding, the Optional Practical Training program, our civil rights, and the academic mission of teaching and research. We cannot meet these challenges individually. Instead, we have come together as HGSU-UAW, to use our collective power to stand up for the integrity of higher education.

Abhinav Reddy is an MPH student in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Niharika Singh is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at the Kennedy School. Abraham Waldman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. This open letter, which can be found here, has more than 200 signatories.