Harvard workers say: No poverty wages! Solidarity with international workers! 

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Thousands of Harvard University graduate student workers walked off the job on April 21. Organized by Harvard Graduate Students Union, affiliated with United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW), the ongoing strike has shut down much of the University’s commencement programming. On April 26, over 100 workers surrounded Memorial Hall where Harvard President Alan Garber delivered a welcome address to prospective students.

The union’s demands include: an inflation-adjusted wage increase to $55,000 per year, expanded child and healthcare benefits, emergency funding for international students under threat of arrest and deportation by the fascist administration of President Donald Trump and independent arbitration for workplace grievances. (harvardgradunion.org/bargaining-2/)

The 2,600-strong Harvard Academic Workers Union, whose members include adjunct lecturers, teaching assistants and postdoctoral fellows, is considering a solidarity strike. With a strike authorization vote pending, over 100 faculty members have pledged not to replace their student assistants while the HGSU strike continues.

Since Trump took office last year, administrators have used his “anti-DEI” [diversity, equity and inclusion] campaign as an excuse to abandon the commitments to diversity that university workers pressured them to make in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd murder.

Now striking workers are fighting to regain those concessions made by Harvard. Roshelle Sun, one of the striking graduate students, linked the strike to the ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] crackdown on undocumented workers, whom the Trump Administration is targeting with arrests, deportation and imprisonment. “How do you expect a noncitizen student to be able to continue their work safely here without those commonsense protections?” she asked. (csmonitor.com, April 25)

“This DEI thing is central,” Ed Childs, a UNITE HERE! Local 26 organizer of the Harvard Union of Dining Services for 50 years, told Workers World. “The attacks on DEI, the attacks on immigrants, it’s an all-encompassing attack, and the fightback’s brewing. From the high school level to the college level, we are seeing students and workers at these schools resisting.”

Protecting workers from racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic discrimination has been central to Harvard workers’ struggles for decades. In 1988, the Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) union won protections for LGBTQIA2S+ workers in their contract and continues to fight for the expansion of these rights.

One class war here and abroad

As Childs described, in “trying to colonize the world,” the ruling class, represented by elite institutions like Harvard, is waging class war in the U.S., too. “That’s the battle. And these graduate student unions are on the front lines, and they’ve got to be supported. And it’s all one struggle. When your enemy attacks, it plays one side of us against another side. And we have to defend, because it’s an attack on the working class as a whole, whether it be the student workers, the custodians or the dining hall workers.”

Harvard grad workers have been organizing a counterattack that shows the power their labor has. Protesters have picketed campus buildings, including the Veritas Science Center, where research has all but stopped. “We’re doing essential work,” explained Lalia Norford, a biomedical PhD student, “and we’re not seeing that respect returned to us.”

Despite growing its endowment to a record amount of almost $57 billion this year, Harvard has slashed wages and healthcare benefits for the workers who have made this windfall possible. “The richest university in the world should not have its workers in this position,” said HGSU President Sara Speller, who described the strike as “a last resort.” (Nature, April 23)

As Childs pointed out, even as Harvard slashes workers’ benefits and funding for vital medical research, the administration pours money into tech and weapons investments. He emphasized that the strike is part of a broader struggle that teachers, students and other educational workers are waging nationwide. In Milwaukee, hundreds of teachers and students walked out of high schools citywide to demand higher pay. In Madison, Wisconsin, an expected mass walkout could force schools to close on May 1, International Workers Day.

Walking out on April 28, faculty at Lesley University in Cambridge have likewise gone on strike to demand higher pay.

Childs said: “Everywhere in the country, you see graduate students on strike. You’ve got attacks on teachers. You’ve got walkouts all over the country. They walked out, so teachers get May Day off. There’s a blowing up of fightback from the attack on education in this country from workers — custodial, dining hall, and faculty workers.”

Wealthy Harvard won’t pay a living wage

Harvard’s previous contract with HGSU-UAW expired in June 2025, but administrators have refused to negotiate a new agreement. Because of the deadlock, graduate workers are going without money set aside to cover childcare and medical emergencies.

The meager wage increases administrators have offered do not come close to covering costs of living as rent and prices surge. In Cambridge, average rents have risen to $3,700 per month.

Childs said: “The capitalist economy is being hit because of the siphoning off of funds to pay for the military. They’re going to force the communities to pay both by higher prices, rents and healthcare.” The cost of living crisis the working class is experiencing is the direct result of “the deterioration of the capitalist economy,” which the overseas “colonial conquest by the Pentagon and Wall Street are making worse.”

China emphasized that the austerity Harvard workers are fighting is part of a broader program of cutbacks inflicted by the ruling class to pay for the U.S. imperialist aggressions against Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Venezuela and worldwide. He said: “So our struggles of our communities are tied directly to the struggles of the anticolonial movement. It’s one struggle.”

As Childs described, the global crisis of capitalism, revealed most recently by Iran’s resistance to the U.S. empire, is intensifying working-class resistance — as the walkouts in Wisconsin and the Harvard strike show. “They can’t do anything about it,” Childs said of the U.S. ruling class. “Their economy is dead, because imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Even Harvard faculty are ready to follow the workers” in a worldwide struggle.”

Childs concluded: “As Martin Luther King said, a bomb that landed in Vietnam also landed in the Black Communities, on Latine communities, on poor communities. Today the bombs that are going off in Gaza and Iran are landing in the education system of this country, in the universities of this country. And that’s what workers here are feeling, and that’s what they’re fighting.”