Campus Unions Ask Harvard To Pledge Worker Protections as Federal Cuts Prompt Layoffs

Harvard’s five largest campus unions urged the University on Monday to pledge to a suite of worker protections amid federal attacks in a Monday letter emailed to Harvard’s top officials.

The letter, sent to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, Provost John F. Manning ’82 and Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81, asks Harvard to commit to using unrestricted endowment funds to forestall layoffs, engaging workers on policy changes, and refusing to cut academic programs “in response to authoritarian intimidation.”

It also asks Harvard to transparently distribute funds across departments and protect non-citizen workers, and calls on the officials to meet with union representatives to discuss the series of pledges before July 25.

“Harvard has publicly committed to supporting research and education, but still has not committed to supporting the workers who perform and facilitate that research, educate our students, and keep the University running,” the letter reads.

A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the petition’s demands.

The message was sent just hours after Garber announced estimates that the University would lose $1 billion annually from federal policy actions, including threats to international workers, funding cuts, and an endowment tax. Garber’s announcement, which was co-signed by other high-level administrators, also extended Harvard’s hiring freeze.

The union letter calls on Harvard to go beyond the $250 million in reserves already allocated to buoy research efforts and use its “substantial reserves and non-allocated endowment funds” — which amount to roughly $16 billion — to prevent “layoffs, non-reappointments, furloughs, overwork, and forced early graduation” during ongoing litigation. It also nudges Harvard to ensure funds are transparently distributed across divisions and departments.

The Harvard Kennedy School, School of Public Health, and the Medical School have all announced layoffs. In addition to the University-wide hiring freeze and program cutbacks, Harvard has also announced pauses on merit-based wage increases.

The unions’ joint letter comes after their members issued a series of similar statements at a cross-union rally in April.

The executive board of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, one of the letter signatories, urged the University to draw from endowment funds in April, before Harvard’s first lawsuit against the Trump administration was announced. In an announcement to members earlier this month, the union wrote that layoffs have affected one to two percent of its 5,000 members and again urged use of the endowment.

“We’re not just talking about all of the people who directly carry out research but also the workers who help facilitate research by keeping the university running and helping it to fulfill its mission in hundreds of essential ways, including workers from all of our unions,” HUCTW president Carrie Barbash wrote in a statement, referencing the Monday letter.

The letter also exhorts Harvard to provide non-citizen workers with legal and social supports and protections, “refuse to cut educational programs in response to authoritarian intimidation,” and to “engage stakeholders, including tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and students” on work- and funding-related policy changes.

The University employs workers under threat by the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented people and those with Temporary Protected Status, alongside the international students in the limelight of the attacks on Harvard.

Two unions that signed the letter — the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Automobile Workers and Harvard Academic Workers-UAW — have asked the University during contract negotiations to expand its protections for noncitizen workers. Harvard has resisted some of the HAW-UAW’s proposed language.

And while Harvard rebuffed the government’s April demands to put a lengthy list of schools and programs under academic receivership, it has made several changes to academic programs that critics see as compliance with the Trump administration — including dismissing the heads of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, severing ties with the West Bank’s Birzeit University, and suspending the Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.

HAW-UAW, which represents non-tenure track faculty, has asked the University to adopt measures that would make decisions to downsize departments subject to collective bargaining and prohibit the use of disciplinary policies to punish faculty for exercising “academic freedom.” Both proposals were rejected by the University in May.

A bevy of other unions will soon head to the bargaining table, but their leverage to seek pay raises and benefits could be limited by Harvard’s shrinking financial capacity. Custodians and security guards are set to negotiate in the coming months. Contracts for HUCTW and Harvard’s dining workers expire next year, but it is possible that negotiations will overlap.

Relations between Harvard and at least some of its unions are tense. Earlier this month, the University axed more than 900 students on research-based stipends from HGSU-UAW’s bargaining unit, saying they were not employees.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.