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When Harvard removed more than 900 students from the graduate student union’s bargaining unit in July, the union lost not just 450 official members, but $20,000 in monthly union fees.

Now, the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers is pushing to win a contract that would require all represented workers to pay union fees — a proposal that could double its annual dues collection and thus bring it to over $1 million, according to union financial secretary Simon A. Warchol.

The fight over the provision, known as an agency shop, in HGSU-UAW’s third contract brings its finances into the limelight alongside the University’s, which are currently under the combined pressure of a massive endowment tax hike and federal funding cuts.

Last year, HGSU-UAW — which represents 5,500 graduate workers — took in $757,578 from roughly 2,000 workers who opted into union membership and paid dues set at 1.44 percent of their gross monthly salary, according to union financial disclosure forms submitted to the Department of Labor.

Roughly 60 percent of the collected due revenue was sent to the UAW for national disbursement.

A small fraction of the national fund — including strike pay, a salary for a UAW representative, and legal counsel — ends up funneling back to HGSU-UAW. The UAW also helps finance larger legal efforts related to higher education, including an ongoing AAUP lawsuit against the Trump administration related to withheld federal funding. The UAW itself then sends a portion of its receipts to the AFL-CIO, a union federation.

These taxes are common, but vary widely depending on a national union affiliate’s size and resources. The 5,000-worker Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers sends a towering 90 percent of its dues to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, as required by the international. In contrast, Brown University’s roughly 600-worker graduate union remitted around 30 percent of its dues to the American Federation of Teachers.

Former HGSU-UAW financial secretary Ryan B. McMillan said that the UAW — which now represents around 100,000 workers in higher education — gives HGSU-UAW access to a wider range of resources that would be “challenging to replicate if we were an independent local.”

After UAW taxes are taken out, the graduate student union at Harvard is left with roughly $300,000, more than half of which is spent on salaries and benefits for three external organizers’ salaries and benefits.

According to Warchol, the employees perform a variety of tasks, processing membership cards and leading organizing committees for specific groups of workers. Their compensation is negotiated by the UAW Staff United, the union for the UAW’s New York and New England regional staff workers.

The rest of HGSU-UAW’s funds are distributed for a motley crew of expenses: Google Workspace accounts, legal fees, and political activities such as lobbying. According to Warchol, the union has devoted a significant portion of its legal expenses in recent years to battling Harvard’s exclusion of 70 lab-based psychology students from the union.

By requiring all workers to pay union fees under an agency shop, Warchol said that the union could expand this pool of external organizers. McMillan added that outside of external organizers, HGSU-UAW could also begin compensating graduate student union officers who have been working on a volunteer basis.

Policies that require all unionized workers to pay dues are illegal in 26 states that have passed “right-to-work” laws. Republicans have long pushed for a federal ban on due requirements, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that agency shop agreements were unconstitutional in the public sector.

Several graduate student unions that have adopted an agency shop, including those at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and MIT, have faced legal challenges from workers who say they should not have to help fund political activities and stances they do not align with.

All three unions are affiliated with the United Electrical Workers, a small independent union that became the first national U.S. union to endorse the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement in 2015.

William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in the City University of New York, wrote in a statement that the broader purpose of an agency shop is to cover the cost of union representation provided to non-members.

In the meantime, as HGSU-UAW hemorrhages money following the exclusion of hundreds of students from its bargaining unit, it has adopted a manual dues payment system for impacted students. (Harvard deducts union dues automatically for workers it considers part of the union.)

HGSU-UAW is also currently pursuing a grievance over the students’ removal.

The union has proposed an agency shop in both of its previous negotiations. Disagreement over agency shop, alongside compensation and Title IX procedures, pushed workers to go on strike in 2021.

“The broader argument for why an agency shop makes sense is that the union is kind of responsible for representing the entire bargaining unit,” McMillan said. “Representing the entire bargaining unit costs money.”

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at hugo.chiasson@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.