On Monday the 22nd, we had our 41st (!) bargaining session and received one counterproposal from management.
tl;dr – After testimonials from two of our members, we presented articles that address childcare, professional development, and workloads. We remain committed to protecting our members’ abilities to start families, better themselves, and work with dignity. In response, Management returned us a mostly status-quo proposal on Paid Leaves with some concessions for researchers.
We started the bargaining session with powerful testimonials from two of our colleagues, one who is a postdoc at HMS and another who is a lecturer in English. Each shared how they have had to go without childcare for young children while working at Harvard, because their families could not afford it. They illustrated how it is nearly impossible to start a family despite being workers with PhDs at the richest university in the world. Cambridge and Boston have some of the highest childcare expenses in the US, and the cost of living in the area is in no small part due to the presence of Harvard itself.
Our workers are stuck between a rock and a hard place – often earning enough to not qualify for state assistance but not enough to actually afford independent childcare. One year of care for an infant in a Harvard childcare center currently costs $45,360, nearly two thirds of the average HAW worker’s take-home pay. We see the results in our classrooms, laboratories, and offices – the distracted researcher worried if an unfamiliar babysitter will take good care of their child, a mother breastfeeding her newborn in front of students during office hours.
A real, accessible childcare benefit—equivalent to what ladder faculty and senior administrators already receive—would go a long way towards fixing this untenable situation. This is what we proposed again in our Family Support article on Monday.
We also presented our counterproposal on Professional Development.
As a union of academic workers, our professional lives are dependent on continuously developing our knowledge and skills. The University profits immensely from this development, and therefore shares some responsibility in fostering it financially. To this end, we have proposed an annual $4000 Professional Development Account for each worker to be used to offset expenses associated with professional activities, such as attending conferences or traveling for research. Harvard already recognizes the importance of such activities, and already provides some funds for doing so, however the availability and distribution of this funding is often obscure and uneven. The Union’s framework brings clarity and equity to the support of professional activity. Additionally, we have proposed regular course releases for long-serving lecturers so that adequate time can be dedicated to formulating new courses and refreshing curricula, as well as possibility of unpaid leave for multiyear appointees who receive outside fellowships or other short-term professional opportunities.
Finally, we presented our most recent counterproposal on Workloads.
This article has been revised a number of times on both sides. Our latest attempt provides a new framework for assessing workloads for teaching faculty, the final remaining point of major disagreement between admin and the union in this article. While many of our workers may share the title “Lecturer,” their jobs look very different from field to field. Admin has proposed a framework in which all lecturers teach four or five courses per year, plus an additional service requirement. We know that current workloads vary much more than this, and there are some programs for which such a rigid framework would be completely untenable. Our proposal delineates five distinct workload tracks for lecturers, depending on the programs in which they are teaching, and aims to preserve status quo teaching workloads across the FAS in the face of admin’s austerity-driven understaffing.
Management had one counterproposal for us: Paid Leaves.
While the proposal largely reflects the status quo for professional staff, and other benefits are limited to the minima required by state and federal law, we did make some gains in a few areas. Notably, research employees (postdocs) will have 12 days per year and can have up to 20 vacation days roll over. Additionally, for workers required to work on a university holiday (e.g. teaching on Veteran’s Day), they will be granted a floating holiday.
Finally, we would like to express our immense gratitude to Sara Feldman, who has been instrumental in the formation of this union and its bargaining. She is unfortunately among the newest cohort of workers that Harvard has cast aside via its cruel practice of time caps.
Sara will be making further trouble as a member of the Bay Area Chapter of UC-AFT Local 1474. She will still be in the labor movement fighting for fellow lecturers, and back in the fight to protect public higher education, which we all know she deeply values.
If you would like to help carry the torch lit by Sara and her colleagues, and fight to make working at Harvard sustainable for all of our members, please reach out to us.
In other news, we filed another charge against the Harvard administration.
The Bargaining Committee has now filed charges against the Harvard Administration for violating labor law with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The two charges we have filed for violating labor law:
- Illegally Increasing workloads. The administration increased workload for teachers in the Expository Writing program this semester by 10%, and are seeking to increase it again to 50% in the fall. We announced this charge a few months ago.
- Illegally reclassifying workers. The administration unilaterally categorized more than 100 workers (who were on the original voting list as eligible to vote) as “supervisors,” and therefore ineligible for union representation. The administration should have raised concerns about these workers during the election process, not after the fact. It is illegal to reclassify workers and communicate to them that they are out of the unit without first bargaining with the union. No such negotiations have taken place, and we are demanding that these workers be added back into the unit—and that their union eligibility is communicated clearly—until an agreement is reached.
Next Bargaining Session
Our next bargaining session is scheduled for July 17th, from 1 to 4 PM. If you are interested in watching, please RSVP here. During that session, we hope the administration will take advantage of the break in the academic calendar and give us responses for the 21 articles that we have been waiting for (in some cases, we’ve been waiting for as long as a year!)
In solidarity,
HAW-UAW Bargaining Committee