Faculty Strike FAQ

When our Strike Authorization Vote has passed, our members will have authorized us to call a strike at any time. We will only call a strike in the case that the administration continues to deny us the fair contract we deserve.

Only very temporarily. Our students’ education depends on our ability to teach them–and our ability to teach them well depends on our working conditions. While students may miss out on class time and be anxious about their grades, ultimately, the long term protections, job security, and wage increases for non-ladder faculty will allow us to be better teachers in the future. 

Striking HAW members and ladder faculty can help students to understand the strike as a consequence of the administration’s unwillingness to bargain fairly, and encourage them to call on Harvard’s leaders to bargain to end a strike. 

Remember: the administration could bargain fairly today—and if it did, students would be able to go to class and receive grades on time. The more unified faculty and students are behind non-ladder faculty, the more the administration will recognize that it needs to reach a fair agreement quickly.

Strikebreaking will not help your students.

Only temporarily. Striking postdocs and researchers will have some time to plan for the strike, they can store samples, slow down experiments, find a lab tech or a grad student who can maintain some experiments for a while. You can help them minimize the impact on your lab’s research by planning with them. This might resemble preparations for times during the year when lab activity already slows down, like during the winter holiday break. Striking researchers can also continue to work on non-Harvard related activities, such as job applications. In the long run, if HAW wins a fair contract, researchers in your lab will be more comfortable and secure in their job and able to conduct their research even more successfully.

Yes, the student-workers of the Harvard Graduate Student Union have launched a strike authorization vote (SAV), and may ultimately decide to strike. Though it is not yet clear whether HAW will find itself on the same timeline, coordinated strikes will put the most direct pressure on the administration to bargain fairly with both unions–which will in turn allow us to end the strike more quickly.

We understand why it is tempting to try to scab or strikebreak–but ultimately such actions will only prolong unfair and unsustainable working conditions for non-ladder faculty and researchers, inhibit their ability to participate fully in the life of the department, and pave the way for more disputes in the future. As PIs, department chairs, and other academic leaders, your research and teaching benefit from the work of non-ladder researchers and teachers. Better working conditions for them will bolster the quality of research and teaching your department is able to provide. Remember: a strike itself does not create work for you; it is the Harvard administration that is asking you to do more work by serving as a strikebreaker. They are asking you to do the jobs of striking workers on top of your own job, and to surveil and report on strikers to facilitate administrative retaliation.

Faculty are not extensions of the university administration, and they are under no obligation to carry out its anti-union campaign. And HAW is not bargaining with faculty or departments but with the central administration—who is the employer of ladder and non-ladder faculty alike. 

One of HAW’s top priorities is winning stronger support for international workers—and Harvard is fighting them on that issue. By supporting the union, you can help international workers win the protections they need and deserve, during a time of heightened risk and stress. 

It is also essential to understand that international workers have the right to strike under U.S. labor law. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act establishes the right of employees to strike, no matter their immigration or citizenship status. Under that law, it is illegal for an employer like Harvard to retaliate against international workers—or any worker—for exercising their right to strike.

When workers decide to organize unions in the United States, over 75% of employers hire anti-union law firms and consultants to combat them. Since the 1970s, these firms have provided employers with a standardized repertoire of anti-union tactics that are used across the U.S. economy. One tactic is to drag out contract negotiations for years. The goal is to demoralize workers, convince them that it isn’t worth having a union, and ultimately organize workers to decertify the union—that is, to vote out the union that they just voted to create. Unfortunately, Harvard’s strategy of slowing negotiations has already hurt HAW members and organizing efforts, as many of our colleagues who have been dedicated to fighting for fair contracts for all of us have already been let go or forced to move on.

Yes, a majority of HAW workers signed a petition for a fair contract in the Fall, and we have had multiple demonstrations calling on the administration to negotiate swiftly. Members from across campuses continue to attend bargaining to show admins our support for our bargaining team, and we are reaching out to elected officials, alumni, the press, students and their families. We are telling them that the Harvard Corporation is hurting the University, degrading the quality of education and research, and treating academic workers unfairly. HAW is not alone in finding negotiating with the Corporation near-impossible: the graduate student worker union and the custodians’ union have both been forced to strike in order to win contracts. 

No, this is not strikebreaking. You can continue to do the parts of your job that you normally do. Just don’t do someone else’s job when they’re on strike.

No. Harvard is required to follow legally mandated lab animal care in absence of HAW members who would normally care for them. You can help plan for this with your team.

The most important protection you have is the solidarity of your colleagues: talk with them. If you and your colleagues together make a commitment not to serve as strikebreakers, there is safety in numbers. The administration is unlikely to retaliate against you when the majority of your colleagues have your back.

If you have tenure already, you are especially well positioned to lend your support without the risk that your colleagues are facing. Please use your security to support us! 

Harvard could choose to pay for any increases in postdoc salary and benefits in our contract out of central funds or they could choose to pass those costs onto PIs. In many cases (including at Columbia and Rutgers), funding for increases to postdoc compensation won by union contracts has been convered by central funds, at least for a transition period. Indeed, when Harvard FAS raised postdoc salary minimums to $65K, they provided central funds to assist PIs with this transition. That said, we will be much more likely to be able to win central funding from Harvard to support postdocs if PIs are involved in advocating for this alongside our fight for better compensation!

Please visit our website at harvardacademicworkers.org.