Harvard’s Academic Worker Union to Begin Contract Negotiations with the University

Harvard Academic Worker-United Auto Workers’s bargaining committee will meet representatives of the University on Thursday to begin negotiating for a contract.

The contract will mark the union’s first formal agreement with the University, covering more than 3,000 Harvard faculty across campus. Negotiations are expected to last at least several months.

HAW-UAW’s large unit, which voted to unionize in April, represents non-tenure-track faculty — including lecturers, preceptors, and postdocs — across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Divinity School. HAW-UAW also houses a smaller unit that represents fewer than 100 Harvard Law School clinical workers.

The initial meeting with the University will last two hours, with the second bargaining meeting scheduled for Oct. 3. The HLS clinical unit is set to start bargaining shortly after the large unit.

“We’re trying to improve working conditions for thousands of people who are doing research and teaching at Harvard, and give them a voice,” said bargaining committee member Sara M. Feldman, a preceptor in Yiddish in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. “So far, we really haven’t had a say over what happens.”

Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a statement to The Crimson that "we look forward to meeting with Harvard Academic Workers to begin the process of negotiating this first contract.”

“We appreciate the hard work all academic workers provide and are optimistic that we will eventually agree to a contract that is beneficial to everyone,” Newton wrote.

According to Adam Sychla, a member of the HAW-UAW bargaining committee, the union’s priorities will be based on a survey sent to union members beginning June 12.

“We put a lot of time into distributing a bargaining survey, reading through those answers, so that we can learn from individuals what they believe is important,” Sychla said.

“It’s clear from the survey that the people who are being represented by this union have a strong desire to make changes here at Harvard,” Feldman said.

Union priorities include wages, benefits, working conditions, and support for international workers. Another key issue for HAW-UAW is the time cap structure of positions, which sets maximum limits on the terms of some workers, including non-ladder faculty. Academic workers in the FAS are limited to two, three, and eight-year terms depending on their positions.

“Students and faculty have reached out to me personally about the time caps, asking for help, because we are always losing faculty — and for a program like mine, it’s devastating,” Feldman said.

Feldman said the 13 members of the bargaining committee have been meeting “several times a week” to prepare for negotiations.

“We made sure to include people from different job categories and different campuses, so that we can get the best representation possible for different constituencies,” Feldman said.

Kelsey M. Tyssowski, a member of the HAW-UAW organizing committee and postdoc in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biology departments, said that she would like to see improved retirement planning options for postdocs.

“We’re often here for a temporary amount of time,” Tyssowski said, making it difficult “to actually gain any of the retirement benefits that most people our age bracket would have from their employer.”

As negotiations begin, Schyla is hopeful that the new contract could be a “transformative moment for the Harvard community.”

“The workers in our unit are an important part of what makes anything in Harvard successful — everything from teaching to research to mentoring to whether courses operate,” Schyla 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_.