‘Shut It Down’ Effort Accelerates at Harvard as Second Union Joins Strike

Now Harvard doesn’t just have President Trump on its case, it also has an additional confrontation with the president of the United Auto Workers, Shawn Fain.

The two battles may seem distinct. Trump is a pro-Israel Republican, while Fain spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and has clashed with the UAW’s court-appointed monitor over anti-Israel statements by Fain.

Yet both Trump and Fain have met resistance in seeking financial settlements from Harvard, which valued its endowment at $68 billion as of June 30, 2026.

Harvard’s battle with the UAW entered a new phase November 10 when a second UAW-affiliated union, the Harvard Academic Workers, joined the already striking Harvard Graduate Student Workers Union. "Harvard messed up, now we’re two, H-A-W," hundreds of striking workers chanted Tuesday morning outside Zimmer Hall on Harvard’s Cambridge, Mass., campus. "Harvard messed up, now we’re two, H-G-S-U."

Speakers at the rally kickoff acknowledged that their absence from the classrooms would leave students with "a degraded undergraduate education," though they blamed Harvard management intransigence, rather than their own decision to walk off the job. As one speaker put it, absolving the union of responsibility, "They pushed us to strike. Here we f—ing are."

It was one of several amplified F-bombs dropped by the Harvard workers at the event. One speaker, Gage Martin, a Benjamin Pierce Fellow in the Harvard Math Department, declared, "It’s like such f—ing bulls—t. F— Harvard!"

The striking workers described their action as including 6,500 employees and called it "the largest strike in Harvard history." The university, America’s oldest and by some measures richest, was founded in 1636.

The director of the UAW’s region 9A and a member of the UAW’s international executive board, Brandon Mancilla, described the walkout as the second-largest academic worker strike in the UAW’s history, after one at the University of California.

Aside from the profanity and the frequent threats to "shut it down"—"it" being Harvard University— speakers and sign-holders at Tuesday’s rally presented a somewhat less radical front than the one that is visible by tracing the social media, public record, and connections of some of the key players. Yet some elements poked through, whether in the keffiyeh worn by one participant or in the declaration by one speaker, referring to one of Harvard’s governing boards: "The Corporation says the system works. Does it? No."

The American labor movement is somewhat decentralized, and strike and contract decisions are usually more heavily influenced by local members and leaders than by national union presidents. Even so, comments at the kickoff rally suggested that the national UAW hopes a win against Harvard will inspire union organizing votes on other campuses nationwide and is investing resources accordingly.

At least some parents are frustrated with a university whose labor relations approach French levels of dysfunction. One Harvard parent, Laura Fein, told the Washington Free Beacon, "As a parent, I'm outraged. If our daughter knew she'd be cheated out of class time—so far seven cancelled for her courses—she could have gone for a Good Will Hunting library card education and saved herself a fortune in student loans. We went through the same nonsense in 2019 with our older daughter, who struggled through a difficult course solo when her instructor cancelled class and would not even reply to emails with questions. Not sure who deserves more blame this time—the entitled, privileged Harvard grad students play-acting as oppressed blue collar workers, or the over-lawyered administration who let this dispute fester for years while their students lost out on hours and hours of promised education."

Those seven classes were canceled even before the second union went out on strike.

The negotiations shine a spotlight on the fact that much of the teaching of undergraduates at Harvard is not done by tenured professors but rather by graduate students or lower-ranked academics who would not make the cut for a tenure-track job at Harvard. These people wind up teaching sections of Harvard’s required expository writing course or required sophomore tutorials in majors such as Social Studies or History and Literature that operate separately from academic departments. Some of the Harvard teaching staff apparently get paid less than public school teachers in Boston-area public schools; an October 30 Harvard proposal on compensation would pay a lecturer $71,355. The proposal includes an elaborate hierarchy with many subtle status and compensation distinctions—"associate senior lecturer," "lecturer-section head 12 mo," "lecturer-section head math."

Speakers at the rally noted that Harvard’s endowment has increased to $68 billion from $50 billion and argued that the workers should share in the wealth, especially given the Boston area’s high housing costs.

Harvard’s provost, John Manning, and its executive vice president, Meredith Weenick, sent a November 10 update saying that "Although we recognize HAW-UAW's right to undertake the strike they began today, the University believes that with the substantial progress already made to date, outstanding issues can be resolved at the bargaining table."

"The University has now proposed an increase in the minimum salary for all lecturers and preceptors to $75,000, a 6.7% increase over the current minimum," the letter said. "Based on the union’s demand during negotiations, preceptors will be reclassified as lecturers once the contract is ratified."

One key negotiating point is whether teachers who don’t want to join the union should be required to pay dues or fees anyway, essentially being forced to subsidize a far-left anti-Israel union as a condition of employment at Harvard. "The University believes that academic workers should be able to decide for themselves to opt to join a union or pay union dues when they accept union-eligible teaching or research positions," the Manning and Weenick letter says. Here’s hoping management doesn’t cave on that one. Where is the "Crimson Courage" advocacy group urging Harvard negotiating backbone when you really need it?

An article in the Crimson by a Harvard teaching fellow, C.J. Passarella, shed light on one mystery, which is why the "striking" workers are still being paid by Harvard.

"This semester, I will earn $13,150 to teach two sections of a General Education course. The University expects that I will spend 14 hours per week doing this work. That breaks down to roughly more than $60 per hour," he wrote. "I was alarmed to learn that some HGSU members are encouraging striking workers to not report hours not worked to the University — and to thereby continue collecting their pay. … One day before the strike began, the University’s Office of Labor and Employee Relations emailed salaried student workers and informed them that those striking were required to report each day they did not work, and that doing so would entail not being paid for that time. HGSU leadership has informed striking workers that there is no legal obligation to comply with this University requirement…"

In contrast to Yale, which had a history of acrimonious labor relations, Harvard’s own labor relations were largely peaceful and productive for decades. The Harvard Clerical and Technical Workers Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers, forged a strong relationship with Harvard’s labor negotiator, a bow-tied professor named John Dunlop who served as U.S. labor secretary in President Ford’s administration. Dunlop believed that a good contract with a good union was good business, and the Clerical and Technical Workers website states, "One of our earliest slogans was ‘It’s not anti-Harvard to be pro-Union’ and that idea is still crucial to us today. … Through collaboration and interest-based bargaining with our faculty and administrative colleagues, we are helping to defeat the notion of a zero-sum game of employees versus employer." What a contrast to the "shut it down" approach of the graduate students and academic workers affiliated with the more militant UAW.

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