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The Cambridge City Council adopted a resolution on Monday condemning Harvard’s removal of roughly 900 workers from its graduate student union, calling on the University to address the demands of its unions during ongoing contract negotiations.
Harvard removed more than 900 students on research-based stipends from Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Automobile Workers’ bargaining unit in July, soon after the union’s contract expired. HGSU-UAW filed a grievance over the removal a few weeks later, and asked to bring the issue to arbitration on Friday.
Cambridge’s resolution follows a similar resolution passed by the Somerville City Council in July, urging Harvard to “seriously engage” with the union’s demands.
But as the union ups the pressure on Harvard at the bargaining table and in public messaging, the University has been firm — arguing that the stipended students who were removed from the union are not employees because their work is geared toward their degrees and their compensation is not tied to specific tasks.
In an August response to the union’s grievance, Harvard’s Director of Labor and Employment Relations Brian Magner also wrote that the workers’ removal would not be arbitrable because the University acted after the union’s contract expired on June 30. (Union officials have held that worker pay stubs already reflected the change on July 1, meaning that Harvard must have acted before the contract expired.)
During a lively public comment period before the Council’s vote, several workers from HGSU-UAW said that the reclassification financially hurt students who were already struggling with rising costs by cutting off access to union benefits.
Biophysics Ph.D. student Ryan B. McMillan told the Council that HGSU-UAW administered nearly $3 million in benefit funds each year during his tenure as co-chair of the union’s finance and benefits committee — covering expenses including medical fees, childcare, and visa renewals.
McMillan said the funds have been particularly important for workers as Harvard continues its ongoing legal battle with the federal government over federal funding and international student visas.
Harvard’s funding is currently restored after a federal judge ruled the Trump administration’s funding freeze unconstitutional, though the White House has vowed to appeal the decision.
“At a time when the Trump administration is waging an all-out assault on higher education, we should all be banding together to get through this assault together,” McMillan said.
Harvard spokesperson Sarah E. Kennedy O’Reilly declined to comment on the resolution, instead referring The Crimson to Director of Labor and Employment Relations Paul R. Curran’s July message announcing the change to the union and a statement issued to The Crimson after the removal.
In the statement, a Harvard spokesperson affirmed that the University “never agreed that non-employees are in the unit.”
“There have been multiple recent decisions (MIT, Brown, etc.) that have reaffirmed and clarified the distinction between academic research and employment, and that has further supported our position and need to clarify any prior misunderstanding of who is in the unit,” the spokesperson wrote.
Workers also held a “teach-in” outside the City Hall prior to the comment period, joined by two other UAW local unions representing Harvard Book Store workers and legal services workers, as well as the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
HGSU-UAW organizer Rachel Petherbridge, who spoke at the teach-in, said in an interview after the meeting that the removals, which affected many students at hospital-based or hospital-affiliated Harvard labs, hurt science workers already bearing the brunt of federal funding cuts.
Petherbridge said the union removals could discourage students from working in external labs where funding cuts are less of a concern since they would no longer have access to union representation.
“They’re disincentivizing students from doing exactly what they’re telling them to do to be safe from the funding cuts, right?” she said. “So damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
—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.
