What a Union Means to Student Parents

The financial costs of having a family weigh heavily on student parents at Harvard, and the University must do more to improve the conditions of current and to-be student parents. Between childcare, dental, health insurance for dependents, and transportation, the prohibitive costs of having a family violate the University’s values of equity and inclusion. As a result, our elected Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers bargaining committee is currently negotiating to codify improvements to our working conditions and benefits in a union contract.

The cost of being a parent while a graduate student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is outrageous. Monthly childcare costs can exceed $3,000 for infants, completely cannibalizing a typical GSAS student stipend. On top of that, Harvard charges $7,178 to insure a spouse or partner and $3,802 to insure a minor.

If a graduate student is expected to take $11,000 — about a third of a graduate student stipend — just to insure their spouse and new child's healthcare costs, the remainder of their "fully funded" Ph.D. is insufficient support their young families. If we made the difficult decision to start our families during graduate school in spite of these financial burdens, we can only imagine that many prospective students’ family-planning priorities prevented them from starting their careers at Harvard, and countless student workers were forced to delay their family decisions due to a lack of financial support.

The administration subsidizes child care for faculty to up to $24,000 per year, with various child-care scholarships available. Surely, the University can also afford us child care support that also allows us to focus on our research and academic work.

In response to these concerns and other issues, student workers began organizing publicly to form a union in 2015. The administration suddenly became willing to make improvements: A 2015 flyer for an 11 percent discount for the semester MBTA pass was then accompanied by a half-off subsidy – a sum that has long been available for MIT graduate workers or Harvard employees — and parental leave was extended from no guaranteed leave in 2010 to 12 weeks of leave today. The increase from six weeks to 12 weeks leave coincided with the timing of the first unionization election during the 2016-2017 academic year.

Recent unionization efforts show that positive change happens only when student workers have organized to apply visible pressure. As support for graduate unionization grew on their campus, Columbia University went from only subsidizing half to fully waiving dependent healthcare premiums for students with funded Ph.D.s.

This April 18 will mark one year since the election forming our union, and we are still without the security of the union contract. It is no surprise that gains in these accommodations reversed and our uncertainty returned as soon as Harvard believed the potential for graduate students unionization had disappeared with the first flawed election in 2016.

But these improvements still fall short. Whether one continues to be paid a stipend during 12-week parental leave or is required to take courses appears to be at the discretion of the program and funding source. Many new parents have not known about the $6,516 one-time payment in support of a new or adopted child. The annual $542 fee for dental insurance covers little beyond two cleanings, forcing international students to delay needed dental work until their visits home. For those of us who cannot afford the housing costs in Cambridge and who commute, MBTA commuter rail passes still take out up to $3000 dollars per year from our already-tight budgets. Further, the MBTA subsidy applies only during the semesters, and our lab experiments do not stop during the summer months. The absence of any MBTA subsidy during the summer is a burden for those of us who cannot afford to live closer to campus with our families.

Our Harvard Graduate Students Union has been a critical vehicle for making these needs known to the administration, but we still have a long way to go. Our union and successive union contracts provide an opportunity to consolidate and document the vast improvements to working conditions for student parents. Having these provisions listed in a union contract may make it such that accessing benefits — such as the $6516 one-time-payment — is not a matter of word of mouth.

We urge the administration to realize the values it professes in inclusion and equity by completing our union contract by the end of this academic year. It is ironic that, even at the world’s wealthiest university, those of us doing cutting-edge research to advance human healthcare and improve the human condition continue to struggle to access basic housing, transportation, and healthcare services for ourselves and our loved ones.

With both of us expecting to graduate the coming year, a completed union contract with provisions that finally make graduate study viable for student parents would be a fitting way to conclude our graduate careers. In the meantime, Harvard could define itself as a leader in supporting graduate workforce, adding heft to its values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Ryan Kuzmickas is a tenth-year graduate student in Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Yuancheng Lu is a fifth-year graduate student in Biological and Biomedical Sciences.