HAW-UAW Contract Negotiations Update – Oct 2, 2024

Yesterday was our second bargaining session and we have both exciting updates and disappointing responses from Harvard.

In a promising first step, we have signed our first Tentative Agreement: Severability (details below).

We were disappointed, however, that Harvard summarily rejected our proposed Memorandum of Agreement for a moratorium on term limits on appointments, a long-standing and broadly opposed policy. See yesterday’s email from the Organizing Committee for more information about the next steps in our union’s fight to defeat “time-caps.”

We are excited to continue our work towards a more equitable appointments structure with a slate of important proposals at the next bargaining session, Wednesday, October 16th from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. These articles will codify important job security protections that Research and Teaching workers desperately need. RSVP here to listen in.

In yesterday’s session we presented the following Articles:

  • Successorship: This article protects the validity of our contract in case Harvard, or parts of the University, are sold or change ownership.
  • Severability. This is a standard procedural article, but important for establishing what happens if a future change of law invalidates a contract provision. Under this article, if a law contradicts a part of our contract, only that individual article is nullified—the rest of the contract remains in force.  
  • Recognition: Establishes the parameters for who is included in our unit.
  • Labor Management Committee: Establishes a framework for ongoing, semesterly discussions between our Union and the University in between contract negotiations in order to address new issues as they arise, such as unanticipated changes in work conditions (e.g. events like COVID).
  • Employee Assistance Program: Codifying that all workers in our Unit have a right to this program.

See below for additional details on the administration’s response to each of our proposals.

In solidarity,

HAW-UAW Bargaining Committee

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Successorship: Harvard rejected this article outright. While they found it implausible that Harvard would ever be sold, they also suggested that a Successorship agreement would hurt their negotiating power with a successor—that Harvard’s sellability, in other words, needs to be protected.

Recognition: The discussion on this article was brief but we expect more to come at our next meeting. We simply reiterated our stance on who we represent as a union. That means ALL postdocs (stipendees and direct pay), non-tenure-track faculty, core and staff scientists, and other non-tenure-track academic workers in FAS, HMS, and HDS. We maintained our position that the work we perform is more important than the often arbitrary ways the University classifies us.

Employee Assistance Program: In line with Recognition, we proposed language to ensure that all workers in our unit have access to the Employee Assistance Program. The University was unsure of whether our whole unit currently has access to this program. We are awaiting clarification and further comment on this proposal.

Labor Management Committee: Most questions on this were simply clarifying. We expect some minor changes will get us to an easy agreement.

Memorandum of Agreement on Time Caps: Harvard claimed that “after appropriate consultation” they rejected the agreement on the grounds that “time-caps” are a long standing policy and that it is “not unusual” to have employee turnover in a unit while negotiating a contract. Harvard refused to offer any clarifications on their rationale or explain what the “appropriate consultation” entailed. Their response ignores the fact that comparable positions at Harvard and at peer institutions do not have such caps. When we highlighted the unusual nature of employees being fired based solely on length of service, Harvard representatives suggested HUCTW positions that are limited in duration as a comparable situation. This conflation between term appointments (jobs with a defined temporal scope, eligible for reappointment) and term limits (a hard ceiling at which a worker is ineligible for reappointment) showed a serious misunderstanding of the situation our workers face. We will make clear in the next session’s proposals that our aim is to eliminate non-renewability.