Some Postdocs Will Vote Challenge in HAW-UAW’s Upcoming Union Elections

As Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers gears up for its unionization election in early April, some workers will participate in the vote despite not yet being formal members of the potential bargaining unit.

HAW-UAW reached an agreement with Harvard administrators earlier this month that allows the group to hold a unionization election early next month. The group’s main unit — including 3,100 academic workers from postdocs and lecturers to other non tenure-track faculty — will hold its election April 3-4. A smaller unit made up of 110 workers at the Harvard Law School clinics will hold its election on April 3.

But union organizers said Harvard has declined to recognize some postdoctoral fellows as a part of the potential bargaining unit due to stipend payments.

Kelsey M. Tyssowski, a HAW-UAW organizer and postdoc in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biology departments, said about 25 to 30 percent of the 2,000 postdocs in the unit are on stipend pay — for instance, a fellowship or grant they applied for themselves.

“Harvard’s basically saying that the people who should be in the union is determined by how someone is paid,” Tyssowski said. “We disagree with that because Harvard is setting our work conditions, they’re still setting our benefits much of the time.”

According to Tyssowski, the excluded postdocs will “vote challenge” in the upcoming election.

“The challenged votes go into a separate pile and will not be counted unless they make a difference,” Tyssowski said. “So if the margin between yes and no votes is less than the number of challenge votes, then we’ll have to go back to the bargaining table and have this discussion with the University before the vote is certified.”

If the academic workers successfully vote to unionize without counting the postdoc challenge votes, Tyssowski said, HAW-UAW will bargain with Harvard for their inclusion.

“When we win the election, we’ll be able to decide at the bargaining table the real definition of our bargaining unit,” she said. “These people who we already think are in our union, hopefully will be recognized by Harvard as also being in our union.”

In a Monday email, a University spokesperson referred The Crimson to a National Labor Relations Board case involving MIT, in which the NLRB ruled that researchers who receive funds that are not “directly tied to completing particular tasks” are not employees.

In the days leading up to the election, union organizers have also been sorting through lists of academic workers and preparing themselves for the vote.

“The biggest thing we’ve been up to has been analyzing the list of eligible workers that we receive from the University as part of the agreement as part of the NLRB process, and reaching out to folks,” said HAW-UAW organizer J. Gregory Given, a lecturer at the Harvard Divinity School.

According to Given, though the short timeframe has posed a challenge to organizers, it has also increased HAW-UAW’s momentum.

“If we win the election, we get to bargaining sooner, we get to a contract sooner,” Given said. “That has people really energized.”

Rebecca Greening, an organizer for the HLS clinical unit and a lecturer at the Law School, said “our goals are really to have as much turnout as possible, so that we can show the level of support that we have to the administration.”

Greening said current efforts include “hearing from people as an organizer, talking with people who are really excited to finally have the opportunity to actually vote yes for a union — bringing really positive energy into winning and then into bargaining.”

“This opportunity is here,” she 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_.