The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working people is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an important episode today about a strike in Cambridge, Massachusetts that is happening right now and involves over 4,000 UAW members at Harvard University. Now, the strike began at the end of April and according to the public announcement which was released by the Harvard Graduate Students Union, “After 14 months of contract negotiations and nearly a year without an active contract, over 4,000 workers represented by the Harvard Graduate Students Union, HGSU UAW Local 5118 launched a strike of indefinite length on April 21st.

This move follows a strike authorization vote in which 79% of the union’s voting eligible members participated, with 96% voting in favor. Graduate student workers will suspend teaching and research labor until Harvard’s bargaining team takes substantive action in addressing the union’s key issues, pay that keeps pace with the rise in cost of living, recourse for harassment and discrimination, support for non-citizen students, protections for academic freedom and fair share fees to equitably distribute the expenses of union representation among others. The union is also bargaining for improved workplace conditions that allow graduate student workers to contribute to the university’s mission without fear of harassment or retaliation. Under the current system, graduate students filing claims of workplace harassment and discrimination can only seek recourse through internal processes, leaving the university as the sole arbiter of its own conduct. HGSU UAW has proposed optional grievance processes in which claims can be adjudicated by third party arbitrators selected jointly by the university and the union.

Such protections are standard among graduate student worker contracts at comparable institutions like NYU, UPenn, MIT, University of California and Stanford. Claire Traweek, a PhD student in material science and mechanical engineering shared why this process of real recourse is so important for student workers. “When I told my advisor about the ongoing sexual harassment I’d been experiencing in lab, he told my accusers I had tried to report them and then effectively fired me by refusing to sign my advising agreement. “Now in an email sent to the Harvard community just days before the strike began, Harvard Provost John F. Manning and Executive Vice President Meredith L. Weenick defended the university’s position on wages and union security saying that Harvard’s proposal of a 10% increase for salaried appointments is quote in line with recent agreements while also rejecting the union’s demands to standardize research assistant base salaries and restructure other pay scales.

Manning and Weenic also claimed that the union’s demand for a third party arbitration process would establish a quote distinct and separate set of non-discrimination, harassment and anti-bullying processes for union members, which they say would “conflict not only with federal regulations for Title IX complaints, but also with the university’s policy that members of our community should have access to the same procedures.” All right, to break down what is happening with the Harvard grad union strike, what is at stake in this strike and what comes next? As we always do, we’re going to take you straight to the front lines of the struggle so you can hear directly from folks who are at the center of it. And I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests. Sara Speller is a fifth year PhD student in the music department at Harvard and the president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union.

Sara works as a teaching fellow for the music department and the department for the studies of women, gender and sexuality. Zoë Feder is a seventh year PhD student in the program in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard Medical School and a research assistant in the microbiology department and Zoë works in a bacterial genetics lab and Jacob Wolf is a third year PhD student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education who works as a teaching fellow in courses about designing learning experiences. Sara, Zoë, Jacob, thank you all so much for joining us on the show today. I really, really appreciate it. Now, I did my best to give listeners some basic context there in the intro, but I want to start by going around the table and just asking you all to lay this all out in your own words. Why are you as graduate student workers on strike right now and what have the past two weeks on strike look like for you?

Sara Speller:

Hello, my name is Sara. Thanks for having me. The way that we’ve been framing this and I think it’s very, very true is that all we’re asking for are adequate pay and adequate protections for all of our workers. You really hit the nail on the head with that summary, so thank you. Great job. But I think among other things, we want our wins to be the floor at Harvard and not the ceiling. So I take specific umbrage with the claim that we are trying to create a secondary way of making sure that harassment and discrimination is dealt with for only us because what we’ve said at the table is we want everyone to have access to an arbitration that is neutral, does not rely on the goodwill of the internal processes at Harvard. But as someone who is a teaching fellow and I only make $26,000 a year at this point in my degree because of funding schemes that are really Harvard’s way of trying to push us through our degrees as fast as possible, I think pay equity is so vital and will make the classroom experience so much better and healthier because what we have right now are people juggling three, four individual classes and dealing with all kinds of different assignments and job work that they have to do within that.

Oh, and to be clear, the reason why people are juggling so many classes, I myself juggled three different class workloads, I guess you can say, this semester because I needed to make money to be able to pay rent in Boston. It’s so expensive to live here. So if the teaching fellows were able to feel comfortable in the fact that we can pay rent, we can take care of ourselves, we can take care of our dependents, we can keep ourselves protected on a legal front for our non-citizens and international workers by being able to afford or receive payment for having immigration lawyers on hand. How much better would the learning environment here be at the richest university in the world? I think they can afford to do that and they should because what we care about is teaching and learning. And then as for the last few weeks on strike, it’s been very difficult.

I love my job, but it also has been very rewarding, especially I’ve been president for about two years and it’s so beautiful seeing people come together from all different corners of the university getting to know each other and sharing in the camaraderie and solidarity.

Zoë Feder:

I love that. That’s so true. I’ve really enjoyed that, especially because I work on the medical school campus and I don’t always have the chance to interface with the humanities and a lot of the other sciences who work on the Cambridge campus. So that’s been really wonderful for me. I think Sarah did a great job as she always does of articulating what we’re fighting for. I think from my perspective, I have been aware of and seen firsthand this ever present issue of harassment, the sort of threat of harassment and discrimination in academic spaces without appropriate tools to protect people. And in my time as a graduate student worker, I’ve been a part of many different discussions and committes at different forms and levels. And I feel really that our union is the first organization that I’ve been a part of where we’ve made material progress in protecting people from the day-to-day harassment and discrimination that they experience.

And so one of the big motivations for me in joining the strike is to address this issue of harassment and discrimination that everyone around me knows is a problem and wants to change. Ultimately, our union and our contract I’ve found have been the most effective tools. So I’m putting all of my energy into strengthening those tools because I’ve seen through experience that’s the fastest and most effective way for me to help protect my coworkers from harassment and discrimination.

Jacob Wolf:

I agree wholeheartedly with both what Sara and Zoë have shared already. I think to add one thing that has been on my mind as someone who is relatively newer at Harvard and who is just learning the ropes in some ways of union organizing in an academic space, kind of tapped into this process as our union began bargaining, which has now been like 15 months ago. So it’s unfortunately been a lot of time to learn the ropes. But as I’ve tapped into this union organizing and been working to connect with rank and file members at the School of Education where I primarily do my work and research, I’ve just learned how much misinformation there is about the union across our campus and how hard it is to correct that misinformation when the work structures at Harvard are so intentionally, in my opinion, complicated. Everything across all of these various schools and departments functions differently.

People have different kinds of jobs that the university tries to treat differently. People often don’t know if they’re eligible for union membership or if their work is protected by the union. When people experience instances of some kind of contract violation, whether that be harassment or even not receiving the wages that they’re supposed to be receiving, they often don’t know that they have union support because Harvard has intentionally made it so difficult to organize as a union. My understanding is that that’s kind of the case across higher ed. Many higher ed institutions have engaged in intentional union busting through these kinds of opaque structures that make it hard for people to know what their rights are. And so the strike has really energized me around our proposals for union security. So things like making it such that all graduate students who are eligible for union membership would have to make an intentional decision either to join the union or to pay a reduced fair share fee that would still contribute to the work that the union still performs for all students through bargaining and through contract enforcement.

And so that, though maybe not the sexiest issue has become very driving for me as I’ve been out and about striking. And I mean, the wages part is still so important too. Again, everyone across the university has different forms of compensation. It’s totally unfair that folks who are more advanced in their programs are making so much less than folks who are earlier in their programs. But even me, someone who’s earlier in my program, I’m still very concerned about our wages not keeping up with inflation. My rent is going up 3.25% this coming year because there’s no rent control in the Boston area in Massachusetts and that’s less than Harvard has proposed in wage increases over the next four years, which means I’m taking home a pay cut. Right now our contract is a pay cut and that is not only is it unacceptable, it’s unlivable.

When we say we’re fighting for a living wage, it is not a euphemism.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let me just pick up on that and let’s go just a little bit deeper on these issues that are so central and so important to y’all and your membership that you would go on strike 4,000 strong to get them, right? Because I think there’s a big perception disconnect here, which I’ve tried to address with this show over the course of many years to get people to understand just because you know that Harvard is, as Sarah said, the richest higher ed institution in the world and it’s got this massive endowment, venerable reputation, yada, yada, yada, that does not mean that the grad student workers who are teaching a lot of the classes are even able to pay their own damn rent. And this is the case in higher ed institutions across the country. I say that as a former grad student who was living below the poverty line.

It’s just par for the course and we’re always told, “Well, it’s not a real job. You’re getting an education. The pay and the work are disconnected in this weird way.” And that’s just not the case. No, we’re workers. We need to make a living. We need to keep a roof over our head. And we have an employer-employee relationship with the university telling us what labor to do to get our paycheck. So anyway, I wanted to ask if you guys could just flesh out a little more for folks who are not part of a higher ed community, who are hearing about this story, listening to this interview right now and they’re wondering what is grad student pay and cost of living for a grad student at Harvard and why is this kind of pay proposal so central to this strike and also the arbitration process because that may seem small to some, but it is so massive when you’re facing harassment from your advisor who holds your future career in their hands.

And you would think that an institution like Harvard whose former President Larry Summers was just implicated in the Epstein files would be a little more sensitive to this kind of thing. So can you guys just talk a little more about why these are so central to this struggle to the point that they would even lead your membership to strike over them?

Sara Speller:

Yeah, great question. I’ll tackle the myth of all of us being like 25-year-old white men in grad school. First, I think this is something I hear all the time and for context, I’m first gen low income to college. I have been at fancy private schools the whole time, but I have never known wealth and it is through the mercy of fellowships and scholarships that I got where I am today in the addition of luck. But I think one of the things that people often get wrong, to your point, is this idea that all of us are doing this simply because we need something to do and we don’t want to work. This is a job. I am exclusively responsible for myself. I do not have anything to fall back on. I happen to be very, very interested in a very niche thing. And so the best job for me right now is teaching and working towards a PhD at this institution.

If I don’t do a good job teaching my students, what worth is their Harvard degrees? And something that people are often surprised to hear is that students at institutions like this have sections or what we call sections for all of their classes that sort of replace the idea of a study group. So they have their lecture or they have their meeting and then they also have a time where they meet once or twice a week with someone who is a graduate student or some sort of non-tenured teaching labor and they talk through everything. So we have to know what they are learning. We have to be able to guide them through complex terms. We grade their papers. We do all of these things in a way that is akin to being a teacher. We are teachers. We’re also researchers in laboratories. The laboratories don’t function without us.

And a lot of us are adults, I think is the other. This sounds crazy to say, but all of the people that I know are not dependent on family or anyone else. This is our nine to five, often our eight to eight and a lot of us have kids. A lot of us have dependents. A lot of us are sending money back home to various places and we live in precarious circumstances. So being an academic worker, being an office worker, being like a sit down job worker is not any different in the reality of precariousness than any other job that we might line up with being in a union. And that’s how union power in America gets dissolved before it can even grow is that we’re told like, “Well, your job is easy or your job is not a real job.” The number of times I’ve heard that from people who are literally accountants and it’s like, “Your job is a real job and you deserve rights.” And I think that is really what our strike is about in a big way is reminding Harvard, reminding each other, reminding everyone that these are real jobs and we can’t subsist on half of the money that it takes to live and work in Boston and also be expected to be doing novel research and also be expected to be doing other things that academic people are expected to do and perform in order to get jobs.

We are juggling so much and we are in a place of privilege certainly, but like MIT is paying their researchers and teachers more on a fraction of the budget down the road. And so even within the realm of privilege and like fancy names, Harvard is falling behind and they’re relying on their name recognition to get them through everything, including what you’re talking about with the fact that we’ve had people having to step down due to their associations with Epstein. They are not talking about this with their students. So that also often falls into the role of teaching fellows and mentors like us. They’re just choosing to let things go by so they don’t have to talk about it and relying on their name and that is not a way to make your dream come true if you’re trying to survive for the next a hundred years like they claim to be, which is why the money and the endowment is untouchable.

Zoë Feder:

I love that. So much of that really resonated with me, especially when you said, Sarah, that we are adults and that that feels silly to say once this is a secondhand story, but one of my coworkers told me they were talking to a faculty member and the faculty member said to them something along the lines of like, “Well, when you’re an adult, you’ll see.” And what they meant was when you have a professor job, and it’s so frustrating and so ironic because on the one hand as PhD students or other kinds of master’s students or whatever we are, we’re expected to be experts in our field and we’re expected to move from consuming knowledge to producing knowledge. But at the same time, we are often condescended to and infantilized in a way that’s just so taken for granted that a professor could accidentally say to a 32 year old when you’re an adult, you’ll see.

Yeah, I’m 32 and I’m lucky. I’m fortunate that I can rely on my family for help in a lot of ways. I’m also in one of the highest paid tiers, I guess as a research assistant in the natural sciences on the medical school campus, I make about $49,000 a year or 50 depending on, I guess, who you ask and how you count the benefits. But even with that for really big expenses, like we had to move a couple of years ago and brokers fees were still legal in Massachusetts and we had moving expenses, we had to go to our parents for help and I’m so grateful and lucky that we were able to do that. But even my generous parents, it wears on a family to be helping to support their adult children this far into adulthood. And so many of my classmates, so many of my brightest, most hardworking classmates don’t have those safety networks.

And so they’re in incredibly precarious positions. And the frustrating thing is that it’s not just kind of a cruel and undignified position to put your workers in, but also it takes away from the university’s larger mission of advancing research and knowledge because now you have students that have to sort of rearrange their lives or take on additional work if their program allows them to, which it often doesn’t depending on other things. And that takes away from the actual research and the work that we’re here to do. And yeah, it’s frustrating at the richest university in the country, but it’s also a problem that exists at every university. I would really like to see Harvard use its financial safety net to help its most vulnerable workers.

Jacob Wolf:

I think to add on and add even more context from another part of the university, I think that the mission or goals of the academic world, there can sometimes be misconceptions about them. I think we do a lot of very niche research that is aimed at producing niche knowledge. And I think that that is an extremely valuable thing that we get to do as a society and extremely important. And also I think the mission of universities is quite practical too. Coming from the Graduate School of Education, I teach people who are graduate students who are training to become teachers or who have left the classroom and are now trying to become administrators, school administrators or things like that. And the work that I see myself doing is taking this extremely valuable knowledge that we’re able to produce as a society and helping to actually make it change the lives of people everywhere through the work of a teacher, for example.

I was a high school teacher prior to starting the PhD program and so now I draw substantially on that experience as a worker at this university. And so I think the idea that our jobs are not practical, that they’re not having a real impact in the world can be a misconception. And I think it’s important to broaden what it means, to broaden the understanding of what the purpose of a university is. The other thing I wanted to say is that I love the work that I do. So many of the people around me love the work that we do and I’ve had many conversations with my colleagues who are sad about striking. We feel energized by it, but I had to miss the last two weeks of the class that I spent the entire semester teaching where my students were doing their final presentations of projects that they’d been working on that are learning experiences that they’re designing and hoping to take to students that are in classrooms with them.

And that was extremely sad for me. And I think it’s important to just underscore that we’re not doing this simply to cause disruption. There are goals that we have that demonstrate how untenable the teaching and working situation is at this university. We have these goals because we don’t feel that we can continue working otherwise. We can’t effectively teach or do research if we are afraid of ICE coming onto campus and our colleagues being deported. We can’t do research and teaching if we’re worried that a professor is going to retaliate against us if we say something in the classroom that they disagree with and those conditions are detrimental to the mission of the university from both this knowledge production angle as well as this making knowledge applied angle.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I think that’s really powerfully put by all of you and just to throw in the other economic kind of point is like you can’t do that work if you don’t know if you’re going to have a roof over your head. And that could be said of any job. Who can do their job well when they don’t know where their next meal’s going to come from, if they don’t know if they’re going to get evicted? I know what that feels like. People who listen to the show know what that feels like. And so it doesn’t matter where you’re working, but if you are not being paid enough to live, it’s insane for bosses to still expect all of us and just to really underscore this for folks listening who don’t live in or near Boston, I just did a quick search on apartments.com and a one bedroom apartment average rent in Boston is over $3,500 a month average one bedroom apartment rent in Cambridge is 3,300 a month or more.

So that is not cheap by any stretch. And to say nothing of like the gas being like a billion dollars right now because of the stupid war with Iran. Sorry, I cut somebody off.

Sara Speller:

No, you’re so fine. I jumped in. It’s the ADHD. But yeah, no, to your point, I’m moving in July and when I went to go look at my little pistachio shell of an apartment I’m about to move to, excited about it. But the management of the building was like, “Oh, you’re lucky. You’ve got one of the apartments that’s under $2,000 in Boston.” It’s 1995 a month not including utilities and it’s like a known thing. It is just very expensive to live here and it’s one of those areas where unless you drive, you kind of have to live in the cities, you have to live in Cambridge, you have to live in Boston.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I’ve been there, man. I’ve spoken on that campus. It ain’t easy. And even if you do drive, the streets are so nuts over there that I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, but I’m a Southern Californian who’s used to a grid, baby. I’m not used to the Hickelty Picklety streets of Boston, but I digress. I want to take a step back for a second. As a former graduate student worker myself and a former union member at the University of Michigan, shout out GEO, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the academic labor movement. And we have covered on this show and at the real news, labor struggles in higher ed led by students, grad students, non-tenured faculty, tenured faculty. I mean, we’re talking public schools, private schools, strikes, unionization efforts. I even interviewed Harvard grad union folks during the 2019 strike when I was an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

And I say that because of course the demands at the center of this fight that we’ve been talking about here, they echo a lot of the demands that I’ve heard from other academic workers in years past. But of course the elephant in the room is that we are living in a very different era in America right now. You guys are living with Working, teaching, preparing for your careers and bargaining all while massed federal agents are swarming our cities and snatching international students and brown people who look like they’re immigrants like off the street and student protestors from their campuses. The Trump administration has launched an all- out war on institutions of higher education from canceling or holding hostage billions of dollars of federal funds and grants, upending the entire academic research infrastructure to the shaking down of universities including Harvard with these gangsterish lawsuits. There are tenured professors who are getting fired right now for blatantly political reasons.

All while university administrations have ramped up their own internal surveillance and repression machines to smash free speech and to smash student protests after all the Gaza encampments. While all of that is happening, like I said, Harvard itself and high profile people like former Harvard President Larry Summers are being implicated in the goddamn Epstein files. The whole point being this is a batshit time to be alive and a batshit time to be a Harvard graduate student worker. I just wanted to ask if you could each kind of give us a worker’s eye view and talk about what it’s been like in your own lives to try to carry on working and getting paid like normal this past year when everything is so grossly not normal.

Sara Speller:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I can start us out. My research for my dissertation is about media literacy and analysis and reanalysis and fighting fascism. And so it’s been a very crazy time running a union and working on a dissertation like that. So I’ll leave that at that. There’s a wealth of things to write dissertations about inside of that. But as someone who largely teaches undergrads, it has been very hard because there are so many days where I think about the fact that it’s crazy being a grad student now and I was an undergrad during the first Trump term, but I can’t even imagine what it’s like to becoming of age in your late teens, early 20s at this point. And I think so much of what I think is important as a teacher is reminding students that this is an insane world and that they have to take care of themselves in order for their brains to function, in order to get the grades that they so desperately want to achieve.

And these are also all kids who have been relentless throughout high school, throughout middle school in order to end up … Again, there is a ton of luck involved in getting into an Ivy league, but these are still kids who are not used to failing and then they come here and even there’s talk. There’s talk being made around the university about putting a tap on the percentage of A’s that can go out to student classes, which as someone in the humanities is absurd because I’m teaching introductory music theory and analysis classes. How are we supposed to be putting a cap on the number of people who get A’s if they walk into the classroom not knowing any theory and walk out of the classroom able to read, able to identify chores. But that’s a little bit inside baseball, but I think it really does illustrate how frustrating it has been to be a teacher and a researcher here and now and here even just being America in general.

I think a lot of the things that we’ve seen, this gangsterish ability that the Trump administration believes they have to try and shake down institutions is directly related to the fact that we over the course of the last 30, 40 years have 50 even have completely disengaged with social science, with humanities, with the value of critical thinking and literacy. And it makes our jobs hard as well because we also have AI and AI protections are something that we’re not forefronting in this current fight for our contract because no one knows what’s happening with it. So it’s really rewarding I think to me personally, but that’s again, because I love teaching, I love the work that I do, but it is difficult already. And then to think about the students that I care about that I’ve had to strike from, to Jacob’s point. There were final projects I was excited to hear about and in the back of my head as president, I knew that there was this looming threat of, oh, Harvard’s not going to cooperate with us to the point that we will need to do a work stoppage.

I’m not going to be able to see how these kids are doing. A lot of them are graduating. And so I hope they reach out to me once they’re done with their time at this institution so they can say like, “Hey, this is what I’m doing now, because I haven’t been able to see their last few weeks in my class.” But yeah, that’s sort of the feeling that I’ve had for several years at this point is like, holy shit, it sucks to be an adult person under this, but it must really suck to be 19. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s kind of where my mind jumps.

Zoë Feder:

Yeah, that’s so true. It’s terrifying thinking of what it would be like to be a young person going through this. As a researcher, it’s been a really wild ride because our funding kind of gets turned on and off at the whim of the federal government. It’s particularly been a little crazy to be I’m Jewish and to be a Jewish grad worker at Harvard when our funding is being cut off over accusations of antisemitism. I maintain that it’s antisemitic to put Jewish workers out of jobs, but also, yeah, it is wild on the medical school, we definitely have people who are in the Epstein files and it’s wild to be walking past those labs. It has been good for my imposter syndrome though, because I’ll think to myself, “I messed up this experiment. I’m so dumb. I’m the worst.” And then I’ll think, “Well, at least I never put myself in the Epstein funds.” But more seriously, I feel like in this time in addition to the regular work we’ve been doing, we’ve also been expected to be ambassadors of Harvard to the larger community trying to show that actually we bring value to this nation and to communities across the country, not just our ivory tower bubbles.

And so it’s been frustrating to take on that extra role and then not be recognized for any of our labor contributions in a way. And also seeing how much money faculty members or people at Harvard have taken from independent donors like Jeffrey Epstein and actively pursue those kind of donations, I think has helped me feel more firm in my stance on pushing back on Harvard’s claim that they’re too poor to give us better benefits and pay equity because they’re constantly selling off parts of the school, selling off the naming rights like our graduate school, for example, and taking in donations and it just doesn’t line up with the picture that they’re painting of their financial situation. Not that I’m saying they should continue to take donations from people like Jeffrey Epstein, but that they have so many different ways of increasing their wealth. And so it’s frustrating to constantly be told, “Oh, we’re too poor to pay your coworkers and the humanities to teach the next generation of scholars.”

Jacob Wolf:

Yeah, I want to pick up on the thread too about the image that Harvard is trying to project for itself at this time. Max, as you’ve discussed and described already, we are in honestly very depressing times that make me very concerned for marginalized populations like non-citizens in this country and it’s for me easy to despair in these times. What does give me hope is thinking about the kinds of institutions that we can build that can stand up to these forces. And a year ago, a year and a half ago, Harvard tried to paint itself as one of those institutions. Our president wrote this extensive letter initially pushing back against the Trump administration about protecting our university. And there was a moment where I was hopeful. There was a moment where I was like, “Maybe Harvard is actually going to do something to stand up to these fascist forces.” And over the last 12 months, I think despite that public projection, the lived experience has been completely counter to that.

We continue to live in conditions of immense opacity about what the administration is doing, the Harvard administration. I am constantly having conversations with people about little whisperings they’ve heard of the negotiations that are happening between the Trump administration and the Harvard administration. And we all kind of know that there’s a backroom deal brewing and we’re just either waiting for some announcement to drop or perhaps even more scarily waiting for these changes to just start taking place on our campus that demonstrate the acquiescence to the Trump administration without needing to take the heat from that.

Yeah, like I said, it leads to despair. It’s hard to stay hopeful, but I think that HGSU, our Graduate Students Union is a counter to that. It is an example of an institution that is genuinely committed to democratic engagement and that is genuinely committed to caring for the experiences and the lives and the wellbeing of all of its members, regardless of whether they are the president of the union or a rank and file member who is still trying to figure out what the union can do for them. Being in the union, being involved in organizing and seeing the power of collective action that we’re able to pull together through our organizing is the thing that’s giving me hope right now as a graduate student worker, but also just as a person living through these troubling times.

Sara Speller:

If I could add just a little bit to Jacob’s point about the fact that we all had a hope when the university initially pushed back against Trump administration, they’ve introduced these campus use rules, especially since the encampments that are a little draconic to the point that early this year there was a big thing that happened where they made a faculty member take down a huge sign that says Black Lives Matter that had been there since I started here five years ago. And we were not initially given any sort of reasoning why. And then it was like, “Oh, the campus use rules, you can’t put political stuff in Windows.” And they also tried to make a claim that because HTSU went on a small campaign with a lot of other unions across Harvard’s campus of putting them back up and putting up a bunch more little Black Lives Matter signs.

And the idea that the HR office offered was like, “Oh, well, this doesn’t have to do with your working conditions.” Which I can easily make the joke, it does for me. And if I’m the president of the union, I fear that it is a labor issue, but what ended up happening was they quietly decided to allow signs like that back up, but they didn’t really mention it. And so I think that’s a very small, almost silly story that feels like it belongs in 2016, but it does show that we have the ability and we have been keeping Harvard to account in a way that I hope every workplace is able to do through unionization or just through collective action. I think that’s kind of the way that I’ve been heartened to Jacob’s point about the kind of times we live in. It’s like, “Oh, the people power is the only power.” And people are starting to realize that and embrace it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, and I know I got to let you guys go, but with the kind of final quick turnaround the table, I wanted to focus on that and talk about where things stand now, what happens next and what folks listening can do to stand in solidarity with y’all because again, anyone who’s ever heard about or been a part of an academic labor struggle knows that the university’s got one ace in the hole in its back pocket that it uses every single year, whether it’s a strike or a union campaign or a protest, wait for the summer. Wait for the summer and hope that all the students dissipate. Some of the grad union members graduate out some of the faculty don’t get reappointed. You have a built-in system in higher ed because of the academic calendar that makes it very difficult to maintain kind of momentum for political and labor struggles like this, but that’s not always the case.

I mean, we’ve reported on many strikes that supposedly ended at the end of the school year and then picked right back up in the fall. I guess I just wanted to ask y’all, given where we are right now in early May, where do things stand with the strike? What comes next? And yeah, what can folks listening do to stand in solidarity with y’all?

Sara Speller:

Yeah. I think one of the things that people can do is continue to share this kind of information with other people. Our website, hgsu.org or Linktree/HGSU has sources where you can donate to our hardship fund, where you can sign on as a community member. So all of these things are definitely things that we love and support, but I think Harvard really cares the most about its image and it doesn’t like that we are talking about it. And the only reason why we’re talking about it is because we want to change it. And I’ll just add that despite it all, like our ongoing strike, I think we’re like halfway through week three at this point. The university has not offered us any additional bargaining sessions. So our next one is May 14th and that runs dangerously close to the finals period and the end of the grading period.

So this is a really difficult and powerful time to strike and I think we’re holding the line really strongly. To your point, they can always say like, “We’ll wait till the summer and we can just as easily say wait till the fall,” but I think we’re still deciding and planning how we want to keep this leverage up and call Harvard to account. We do have faculty members who are getting rather tired of the strike, so we’re happy to se them join our ranks. But yeah, all kinds of sharing, donating, all of that is immensely helpful.

Zoë Feder:

Yeah, definitely knowledge is power. And I think that Harvard, the administration and the representatives at the bargaining table, they rely on the fact that the public and even many members of the Harvard community will believe the stories they’re puting out that they just can’t afford to give us the benefits and the pay equity we’re asking for. And the more everyone pushes back on that, including people that don’t live in this area but all across the country, like I’m from a small town in a red district and I think it’s really powerful to build solidarity with people in my hometown because they have representatives in Congress that hold power and we don’t have any other connection to those people or those representatives. So this summer, one thing I’m going to focus on is connecting back up with some of the working class movements in my hometown and strengthening those partnerships.

Jacob Wolf:

Yeah. I think at the risk of sounding corny, I do think that just participation in this growing labor movement is what seems most important to me right now because it’s across the country and around the world. I think we are starting to see changes in labor, changes in labor organizing. And I think that those are really powerful. What will happen with us is extremely important and we’re committed to that fight, but it’s just one small fight amongst this many fights that are going on across the country and around the world right now. I think just like doing what we can to support labor organizing is important, whether it’s at Harvard or in a hospital in the cab of a delivery truck. There’s many places that we need labor organizing right now and that seems urgent and important.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Sarah Speller, Zoe Fetter and Jacob Wolf, all graduate student workers at Harvard University and all members or officers of the Harvard Graduate Students Union, which has been on strike since April 21st. You can stay up to date on the strike and follow the grad union using the links that we provided for y’all in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today, I promise you guys it really does make a difference.

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.