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Harvard denied its graduate student union’s long-held request to require represented workers to pay union fees during contract negotiations on Thursday, ratcheting up tensions at the bargaining table as the school year begins.

The University’s counterproposal to the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers rejected its request for an agency shop, which requires all workers represented by the union to pay fees. Student workers currently represented by the union only have to pay dues if they choose to become members.

According to three HGSU-UAW bargaining committee members, Harvard officials said on Thursday that employees’ status as student workers should preclude the union from operating with an agency shop. University negotiators have also opposed instituting agency shop rules for its newly formed non-tenure track faculty union.

Only 30 percent of HGSU-UAW’s represented workers currently opt into union membership and pay dues. Members pay 1.44 percent of their gross monthly salary, which added up to $757,578 in overall dues last year, according to financial disclosure forms.

Union representatives contended that workers would not be forced to join the union, but just to help defray representational costs. They also argued that the union membership rate among PhD students is higher than 30 percent.

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment on Harvard’s rationale for rejecting the agency shop.

HGSU-UAW has been fighting for an agency shop since its first contract negotiations began in 2018, though they have so far been unsuccessful. Four of the six Ivy League universities with graduate student union contracts require fees from represented workers.

These dues are mostly used to finance HGSU-UAW’s legal expenses and employ external organizers, but roughly 60 percent of total dues are sent to the UAW to be disbursed nationally and to finance the UAW’s strike fund.

Harvard also struck down a union request to allow third-party arbitration for all discrimination and harassment cases in June. Both issues, alongside compensation, played a major role in the union’s decision to strike in 2021.

Compensation has yet to come to the table, but is likely to prove contentious — occurring amid a period of intense financial uncertainty for the University. Harvard’s top brass have estimated that the University could lose up to $1 billion annually through federal policy changes, including research funding cuts and an endowment tax.

HGSU-UAW bargaining committee member Albert T. Chen said the union asked Harvard officials to detail how they decided upon allocating $25o million in bridge funding for research though the Harvard Management Company borrowed $750 million in April to finance contingency funds. Harvard declined to provide the information, according to Chen.

Biology PhD student Ziyuan Zhao ’23, the union’s compensation article representative, said that the union is unwilling to make preemptive economic concessions to Harvard, despite the University’s financial uncertainty. Several campus unions have already urged Harvard to pull on its $16 billion in unrestricted endowment funds during the crisis.

“They have a massive pool of money, and what we are advocating for is getting student pay according to the living standard in Cambridge,” Zhao said. “The curve is getting higher and higher, so I think we are not going to make concessions upfront just because they are unwilling to pay.”

—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.