Student workers throughout Harvard University are voting to exercise our legal right to strike. Law students should vote yes.
Did you know that the last time Harvard gave its research assistants a raise was during the Bush administration? (The younger Bush, but still.) This is just one of the many reasons that we encourage our fellow law students to vote “yes” in the Harvard Graduate Student Union’s strike authorization vote this week.
Currently, research assistants and course assistants at HLS get paid only $12 an hour — the Massachusetts minimum wage. We used to make $11.50 an hour, before the statewide wage increase raised our pay earlier this year. BSAs get paid even less: By some of their own estimates, they make as low as $8 an hour, which is less than the minimum wage. Meanwhile, HLS is asking students to take on more and more debt, as tuition has skyrocketed 57% in the same period of time.
This is not normal, and it is not acceptable. Graduate student workers at other schools within Harvard are paid significantly better, often earning $20 an hour or more. We shouldn’t have to be fighting tooth and nail for fair wages at the richest university in the world, but Harvard has given us no choice.
Students come from various economic backgrounds and have different career plans. For some students, wages earned during the semester is an essential component of their income and budgeting. Law school is already stressful; it shouldn’t be made more taxing by forcing students to work for low wages.
Our union is negotiating for more than just fair wages. While plenty of law students are under 26 and are able to stay on their parents’ health insurance plan, many others are 26 or over, or are otherwise not able to be on their parents’ plan. Health insurance should be affordable for all students at the law school, if not free. Currently, student health insurance costs $3,700 per year, and it costs almost $12,000 a year to enroll a spouse and child.
Harvard allegedly has a Student Health Planning Committee with student representatives who “provide valuable input.” However, as law students, none of us have ever received an email that mentioned the existence of this committee, much less solicited our opinion. We also had no say in which students represent us, nor do we even know who they are to be able to pass along our concerns. Our elected union bargaining team, by contrast, is fighting hard to guarantee that all student workers have health insurance.
Another major issue that has come up in bargaining is the university’s desire to carve out only the harassment and discrimination procedures from the contract’s grievance procedure. For every other provision of the union contract, the union will be able to bring a claim that the university has violated the contract before an independent arbitrator. The university does not want this to be an option in the event a student worker is harassed or discriminated against. Instead, the university wants student workers to rely on the Title IX process, the same process that has failed students in other Harvard schools. In the Government Department, Professor Jorge Dominguez was accused of sexual harassment multiple times, for decades, yet continued teaching until students inspired by #MeToo forced Harvard to take meaningful action.
This is in stark contrast to the Harvard Graduate Students Union, which represents thousands of student workers on campus. We elected our bargaining committee representatives in a democratic process, and we regularly receive updates through multiple means of communication about what issues they’re fighting for. In fact, we first learned about this change in the health policy through our union’s Instagram account, of all things. Harvard, on the other hand, didn’t care enough to make sure we knew.
Harvard has fought our union every step of the way. First, it illegally excluded hundreds of eligible student workers from voting for our union. Next, it appealed to the Trump-controlled National Labor Relations Board to attempt to prevent student workers from getting a new and fair election — and lost. (When even Trump’s NLRB appointees think that you illegally mistreated your workers, you know you’ve acted badly.) Then, once we won our union, it stalled on providing bargaining time with our bargaining committee.
Harvard’s refusal to raise our wages, improve our health care, or include desperately needed protections against harassment and discrimination in our contract is just their latest tactic. Harvard has left us no choice but to authorize a strike — join us!
The simple truth is this: The labor provided by graduate students makes this place run. Legal Research and Writing (LRW) could not exist without the BSAs, and virtually all the research published by HLS faculty relies on student research, just to give two of many examples. If Harvard will not give us the wages, health care, and protection against harassment and discrimination that we have earned, we must be prepared to withhold that labor. Harvard has left us no choice but to authorize a strike — join us!
Jon Levitan is a 1L, Sebastian Spitz is a 2L, and Vail Kohnert-Yount is a 3L. All are members of the HLS Labor & Employment Action Project.