Harvard’s newest challenge is a grad student workers strike
Under storm clouds and splashes of spring rain, about two dozen people holding blue and white signs march past Harvard University’s science center. Revolving around a young woman holding a megaphone, their chants ricochet off the majestic brick buildings that dot the campus.
The woman in the middle shouts, “What’s scandalous?”
“Harvard salary!” replies the crowd.
Why we wrote this
Harvard University’s graduate student union went on strike this week to demand higher wages for all graduate students and more protections for immigrant student workers. The university responded by proposing to raise salaries more modestly.
These protesters are among more than 4,000 Harvard graduate students who went on strike this week, walking out of their on-campus jobs where they teach, grade papers and conduct research that has long placed the school among the world’s top universities.
The strike comes at a difficult time for Harvard, which is facing the national spotlight as President Donald Trump attacks the university with the full force of the U.S. government. Harvard has faced lawsuits, billions of dollars in frozen federal funding and threats to revoke its tax-exempt status. Last year, the country ran a deficit for the first time since the pandemic, and administrators repeatedly sought to negotiate with the Trump administration.
On campus, the Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) says that after 14 months of negotiations, it has seen little or no progress on its demands. Those measures include doubling the lowest annual salary to about $26,000, an emergency legal fund for students who find themselves caught up in immigration proceedings, and a reformed process for workplace harassment and discrimination complaints.
In a statement before the strike, the university said it had proposed a 10 percent salary increase over four years and that the union’s demand for an independent grievance procedure could violate federal law. The statement does not address protections for non-citizen workers.
Through a spokesperson, Harvard Dean John Manning declined to comment beyond the university’s public statement.
“Even though we are students here, we provide a lot of labor to the university,” Juan Orozco, a doctoral student in microbiology, said during the union’s second day of picketing. “It’s not just about my personal benefit. I’m also benefiting the university.”
Cameron Pugh/The Christian Science Monitor
Power in numbers
In the United States, union participation among graduate students has increased 133% since 2012, according to a Hunter College report, and 60% of that growth has been driven by students at private institutions. Since 2023, graduate students have voted to unionize at Stanford, Duke, Yale and elsewhere. Closer to Harvard, students voted in 2022 to unionize at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
These graduate student unions have also proven their power in recent years. In 2022, some 48,000 graduate students at the University of California staged the largest strike in the history of American academia, demanding better working conditions and higher wages. About 3,000 graduate students at Boston University went on strike for seven months in 2024. Last March, a graduate student union at Northeastern University, across the Harvard River from Boston, indicated it would soon hold a vote to authorize a strike.
HGSU was certified as a union in 2018, two years after the National Labor Relations Board granted students at private institutions the legal right to unionize. The organization has already struck twice – once for nearly a month in 2019 and a second time for three days in 2021. Both incidents involved disputes over compensation and workplace grievance reporting procedures.
This time, with final exams just weeks away, it is unclear when the strike might end. Harvard trustees and the negotiating committee are scheduled to meet April 28.
The strike attracted widespread local attention.
“I also greatly sympathize with the plight of graduate students at this time when we face an ongoing affordability emergency,” state Legislator Mike Connolly, a Democrat representing Cambridge and neighboring Somerville, said in a telephone interview. He went to the picket line Tuesday. “One of the things these universities can do is use more of their resources to…address issues like housing affordability.” »
Many of the union’s demands are ongoing labor concerns. Others – like the request for paid leave to attend immigration proceedings for non-citizen workers – reflect tensions nationwide, as the Trump administration moves to crack down on both legal and illegal immigration.
Cameron Pugh/The Christian Science Monitor
“We’ve had so much political pressure in the last year, especially around the rights of non-citizen workers,” says Rochelle Sun, who is pursuing a doctorate in government, as strikers chant in the background. “How do you expect a non-citizen student to be able to continue their work here safely and feel safe as a student here without having these common-sense protections?”
Strikes often reflect fundamental concerns about justice and fairness, says Kate Bronfenbrenner, a senior lecturer emeritus at Cornell University who studies collective bargaining.
“Organizing campaigns and strikes are never won if they only concern wages, because the employer can always throw a little more money into them and defuse them,” says Dr. Bronfenbrenner. “Success is much greater when they focus on justice and equity. »
Affordability issue
On the second day of picketing, the strikers marched, ignoring the bitter cold of April, and distributed information leaflets to passers-by.
Participants appear as driven by low wages as they are by the desire to protect immigrant students from detention and deportation. Denish Jaswal, a doctoral candidate in philosophy and member of the union’s negotiating committee, says she earns about $26,000 a year working as a teacher. In Massachusetts, that qualifies her for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, she says.
Most Harvard faculty teach four sections and earn about $26,300 a year under their most recent contract, which expired last June. Research assistants earn a contract minimum of $42,480 a year – although most earn more, according to the union. In contrast, doctoral research and teaching assistants at MIT, just three miles away, earn north of $50,000 a year. The strikers point out that Harvard’s endowment in 2025 was $56.9 billion, more than double that of MIT.
Doctoral students receive scholarships to cover tuition and health insurance. But they live on the income from their teaching and research. And those salaries don’t go very far in Cambridge, which is among the most expensive cities in the country. The average rent here is $3,700 per month, according to Zillow, which is 85% higher than the national average. Student workers also argue that salary increases should be proportional to inflation. Previous contracts only provided for fixed, predetermined increases.
Cameron Pugh/The Christian Science Monitor
Harvard defended its salaries, pointing out that doctoral students receive at least $425,000 in aid over at least five years of study and arguing that its offer of a 10 percent raise over four years is “consistent with compensation offers made in other recent collective bargaining negotiations.”
In a counterproposal to the union’s demands, Harvard proposed raising salaries for research assistants and faculty to $50,340 and $27,024 per year, respectively, with flat increases through 2029.
The university’s procedures for reporting harassment and discrimination in the workplace are also at issue. Under its current rules, Harvard responds internally to formal complaints from graduate students. The union argues such complaints should be subject to third-party arbitration, which it says is the norm at other universities.
Harvard countered that it must use identical processes for all employees, and argued that the union’s demands would violate “federal regulations relating to Title IX complaints.”
Sending a message
Ms Jaswal says the union hopes to end the strike soon. They do not want to see prolonged disruption resulting from the 2019 strike.
“Our goal is really not to harm our university community, but to send the message to the university that Harvard works because we do,” she said.
Mr. Orozco, a microbiology student, says that fundamentally the strike is about recalibrating what Harvard considers valuable. Although university officials repeatedly emphasize the importance of graduate students to its mission, Mr. Orozco says he doesn’t feel it. This is not reflected in the salary, he says, nor in the degree of resistance their demands have generated.
“Harvard is really banking on the fact that it has great prestige,” he says. “We are the ones who make the institution prestigious.”
