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More than 50 protesters supporting Harvard’s unions called on the University to protect non-citizen workers and draw on its endowment to ride out funding cuts at a Sunday rally in the Science Center Plaza.
Labor organizers at the rally urged the University to ensure that non-citizen and time-capped workers would not face layoffs amid Trump administration’s threats to federal funding and international workers.
The rally comes a week after the University moved to sue the Trump administration for freezing $2.2 in federal funding to Harvard. The University had moved to preemptively freeze hiring, and after the freeze, announced layoffs at the School of Public Health.
Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers steward Evan R. Lemire presented a list of demands at the rally compiled by the union’s International Students Working Group that requested Harvard refrain from terminating students’ enrollment or worker status if their visa status changes and issue immediate notifications to students, faculty, and staff if federal officials request to access records or campus buildings.
The demands were based on a series of requests that graduate student workers had already issued to Harvard schools, according to bargaining committee member Denish K. Jaswal. Three of the university’s academic and student unions are currently bargaining over similar protections.
“Work with the unions currently bargaining to accept their proposals on non-citizen worker rights, academic freedom, and job security protections,” Lemire said.
Harvard Academic Workers-UAW proposed extending legal permanent residency sponsorships and informing employees of immigration-related warrants as soon as possible in February, though the University rejected the changes in March. Both HGSU-UAW and the undergraduate union plan to introduce their own provisions on non-citizen workers in bargaining sessions.
Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union-UAW bargaining committee member Isaiah Day said the unions decided to work in concert to prevent the University from extracting concessions from one union and leveraging them against others.
“The best way to make sure that we each got the best outcome would be to work together, to show that we have a united front,” he said.
A University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.
According to organizers, the rally was held during Visitas — Harvard’s admitted students event — to highlight “Harvard labor’s role in making our University a place that students from around the world aspire to attend.”
Since President Donald Trump took office, millions of federal grants to researchers were cancelled before the administration’s blanket funding freeze. More than $110 million in NIH grants have been revoked, and dozens of researchers have received stop-work orders from the federal government.
HAW-UAW bargaining committee member Adam Sychla, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, said at the rally that he had watched colleagues lose their jobs.
“I’ve been watching some of the world’s best scientists lose their jobs,” Sychla said. “My colleagues are being unjustly detained. I’ve had to take on double the workload just to keep my lab alive, and I’m applying for funding — scrambling to find funding for work that was already funded.”
He celebrated Harvard’s lawsuit as a “great start” but argued the University needed to use its resources to address risks to workers before a resolution is reached.
“If it doesn’t, we lose jobs, we lose life-saving research, students lose opportunities to learn, and we lose the very promise of American higher education,” Sychla added.
Speakers from multiple unions also argued for the University to abolish time caps — a policy that limits non-tenure track faculty appointments to two, three, or eight years.
HAW-UAW bargaining committee member Sara Feldman called on Harvard again to adopt a moratorium on time caps for the duration of bargaining to protect struggling departments amid the University-wide hiring freeze.
“We need a fair contract now, which would end the time caps forever,” she said, to cheers.
—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.
