Today I Will Vote #UnionYes

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Today and tomorrow graduate students at Harvard will vote on whether or not to form a union with the UAW. Harvard students will be the first graduate students at a private university to vote on forming a graduate student union after the National Labor Relations Board’s decision in August that teaching and research assistant are employees. I plan to vote for the UAW. I do so enthusiastically.

I do so for several reasons. This morning I offer three of them. The first is that having a union will allow graduate students to negotiate with Harvard collectively instead of as individuals. Without a union contract students who are teaching or working for a professor as a research assistant have no easy recourse when they are mistreated. I know of several students who have been paid egregiously late. In one instance, a student wasn’t paid for multiple months by an administrator he did work for. In another, a teaching fellow wasn’t paid for more than a month after starting teaching. I am confident that having a union contract at Harvard will put an end to such abuses.

Second, Harvard is the first of several private universities where there will be graduate student union elections in the next months. A union victory at Harvard will encourage graduate students at Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and other institutions in their efforts to form unions. By voting for a graduate student union at Harvard I am voting to improve the lives of graduate students not just at Harvard but at other institutions throughout the country.

Third, the election of President Trump will be likely mean that the labor movement itself comes under increasing attack. Voting to form a graduate student union at this time is a statement in support of the labor movement at time when it needs one. Unions have long been a force for fighting inequality. By supporting HGSU-UAW I will be standing with not just graduate students but workers across the country.

Improve the lives of Harvard graduate students, stand in solidarity with graduate students at other institutions, and fight for the wider labor movement, #UnionYes!

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