Harvard Undergrad Workers Union Struggles to Fill Bargaining Committee

Updated October 17, 2024, at 5:17 p.m.

The Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union-United Auto Workers has been negotiating at half capacity.

After losing five members over the summer, the bargaining committee of HUWU-UAW only has five members — of nine total positions — one of whom is still in training.

When HUWU-UAW first began negotiating with Harvard for a contract in March, five months after the unit voted to unionize, it had filled eight of the nine spots on its bargaining committee. But In the fall, only three members of the committee returned after four students graduated and another stepped down.

In September, the union, which has about 400 workers, held initial nominations for bargaining committee spots, with candidacy statements due at the end of the month — but only one person accepted a nomination.

Taryn M. Riddle ’25, who works in the Harvard Kennedy School library, joined after nominations closed — bringing the total to five — but is still in training and has not yet participated in any bargaining sessions.

“My job right now is to continue my orientation, keep meeting with people,” Riddle said.

Bea Wall-Feng ’25, a member of the bargaining committee representing the Harvard Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Offices and a former Crimson Magazine editor, said the reduced capacity has made it more difficult to represent viewpoints from across the unit.

“The more workplace representation we have, the easier it is to talk really specifically about workplace conditions,” Wall-Feng said. “We can still bring in union members who aren’t on the bargaining committee into bargaining to talk about their experiences, but in terms of the people who are there every week, that’s one difference.”

The bargaining committee — whose members work in Harvard’s libraries and the EDI office — lacks representation of student-workers at cafes or pubs operated by Harvard Dining Services.

According to a public notice calling for bargaining committee nominations, in addition to filling the two open positions from cafes and pubs, HUWU-UAW is still seeking one more representative from Harvard Libraries and another to fill an at-large vacancy.

According to Kay Ljunggren — a HUWU-UAW adviser, UAW staffer, and former president of the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers — the “main roadblock” is “the balance of being a student and a worker simultaneously.”

Per Ljunggren, the union has also struggled with communication with the University.

“We haven’t gotten a list with full contact information since our election back in November,” Ljunggren said. “So we are working with very outdated information.”

“There could be workers out there who are interested that we’ve never been able to get in touch with,” she added.

According to Wall-Feng, Harvard’s representatives initially agreed to send bargaining committee members an updated list of workers by “the beginning of October” before pushing the deadline to Oct. 15 — but failed to meet both deadlines.

Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a statement that “we continue to work through compiling an accurate list, with includes pulling data from multiple sources in different systems across the university.”

“We anticipate having a complete list soon,” he added.

HUWU-UAW also lost a significant portion of its unit after Harvard closed the Queen’s Head Pub in May. Though the College intends to reopen the pub as an event space, the new workers will not be members of the union.

Ljunggren said the typical work of a union connects closely with bargaining committee recruitment efforts.

“We’re working really not necessarily with the sole goal of building the bargaining committee, but the goal of engaging student workers so that we can have a democratic and well-supported contract negotiations,” Ljunggren said.

—Staff writer Aran Sonnad-Joshi can be reached at aran.sonnad-joshi@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @asonnadjoshi.

—Staff writer Sheerea X. Yu can be reached at sheerea.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @_shuhree_.