We have some updates from Monday’s bargaining. While we are making progress, we see management putting in some heinous provisions in their counters. If you haven’t yet signed our Contract Now Petition, please do so now to show that you care about our fair contract. Management will keep adding poison pills unless they see people care.

Management Counters:

  • Access Needs
    • We won basic accommodations for disabilities in our last counter.
    • This week we won a pathway to provisional accommodations before you get medical documentation.
  • Health & Safety
    • We won major protections against doxxing in this article. As Harvard is under the public eye, these protections are critical for our members when they are threatened by bad actors.
    • We are still fighting for free mental health support in the case of work related violence, which management does not want to guarantee.
  • Workloads
    • Management struck out an ENTIRE section called “Prohibition of Arbitrary Role Expansion” and all protections within.
    • Management further removed protections on calculating teaching loads.
  • Layoffs
    • Management basically struck out any protection against arbitrary firing by allowing themselves to lay people off for “other reasons” without having to provide any justification or evidence.
    • Management also cut recall provisions, something that other workers at Harvard already get.

Our Counters:

  • Employment Records
    • We are very close on this Article that governs how the Corporation is allowed to distribute your information. We expect to be able to sign a Tentative Agreement shortly.
    • Your information must be confidential except in a few specific circumstances (such as by your approval or a subpoena).
    • We have also created a process for you to dispute information in the record that you disagree with.
  • Evaluations
    • After several rounds of back and forth, we hope to get to an agreement on this article that sets out the process for evaluations soon.
    • We are still negotiating how rare and outlier comments from student evaluations should be treated in evaluations of teaching faculty
    • We refuse to allow management to include language limiting what is grievable, giving themselves leeway to break the agreement. We insist that all provisions must be enforceable.

In solidarity,

The Harvard Academic Workers FAS/HMS/HDS Bargaining Committee