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Harvard will remove more than 800 students on research-based stipends from its graduate student union, capitalizing on recent National Labor Relations Board rulings to deal a crushing blow to student labor organizing.
The University announced the change in emails to faculty and leaders of the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Automobile Workers on Wednesday. The union’s membership list will be updated on Thursday.
In the message to the HGSU-UAW, Harvard wrote that stipend recipients are not considered employees under the National Labor Relations Act “and do not have the right to unionize.”
“Harvard has never agreed that non-employees should be included in the unit,” the message read.
Thousands of students on stipends have been part of the HGSU-UAW’s bargaining unit during the five years since the union’s first contract was ratified. There are currently roughly 2,000 students on stipends represented by the union, but only about 800 will no longer be considered employees because many hold multiple positions, according to a Harvard official.
In the message to faculty, senior vice provost for faculty Judith D. Singer wrote that Harvard made the changes in line with rules that were “recently clarified by multiple decisions interpreting the NLRA.”
Students receiving stipends as they conduct research toward their degree “are not employees because they do not perform services for the university in exchange for compensation,” Singer wrote.
The move comes one day after the expiration of the HGSU-UAW’s previous four-year contract at the end of the 2025 fiscal year. Negotiations have been heated thus far and are expected to continue for months.
The union has not yet said whether it intends to pursue a legal challenge to the University’s decision.
“We are working closely with the UAW and exploring our options,” union president Sara V. Speller wrote in a statement.
Harvard’s move builds off a 2023 decision by the NLRB that declared that 1,500 graduate fellows at MIT — who are paid via stipends — were not employees under the NLRA and could not join the MIT Graduate Student Union.
The NLRB ruled that the MIT fellows received stipends as part of research or teaching they performed “to further their own academic purposes,” not as compensation for work controlled by their employer. In July 2024, the board declined to hear an appeal.
A Harvard spokesperson reiterated in a statement to The Crimson that “the University has 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 said.
The MIT decision was issued under the Biden administration, when the NLRB had a Democratic-appointed majority. But shifts on the board could now render it more hostile to student labor organizers — potentially a boon for Harvard from the Trump administration, even as the two spar in court over other issues.
The NLRB currently lacks a quorum to issue decisions after Donald Trump dismissed one of its members in January. The case is still under review — but if Trump is able to install a Republican-appointed majority on the NLRB, any cases brought by the union or University could be used to overturn the 2016 decision that declared graduate students employees.
The reclassification of stipend recipients will send unprecedented shock waves through the HGSU-UAW, causing the union to lose around 15 percent of its 5,500-member bargaining unit. But the HGSU-UAW has spent years in a smaller-scale dispute with Harvard that hinges on some of the same questions.
An arbitrator ruled in 2024 that Harvard wrongfully excluded roughly 70 lab-based psychology students from the HGSU-UAW’s bargaining unit, noting that similar stipended positions were covered by the union in her decision.
Since the arbitrator’s ruling, Harvard has filed two appeals in federal district court — including one last month that argued the students were not employees because of the nature of their stipends. The first appeal was rejected by a federal judge Leo T. Sorokin in May.
Carving graduate students out of the union could also give Harvard more control over its labor costs as it continues its dire funding battle with the Trump administration. The University has faced the loss of nearly $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard since April and been blacklisted from future federal grants. Meanwhile, Congress is on the verge of passing an 8 percent endowment tax that could cut into Harvard’s returns for years to come.
Correction: July 2, 2025
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Harvard notified the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Automobile Workers bargaining committee that stipend recipients would no longer be represented by the union. In fact, the message went to union leaders but not the bargaining committee.
—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.
