Academic workers at Harvard vote to unionize

Thousands of lecturers and researchers at Harvard University voted to unionize this week, ending a years-long campaign to bolster wages and protections for academic workers at the nation’s oldest university.

Around 3,300 non-tenure track faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Divinity School cast votes in favor of organizing; a smaller unit of 100 employees from Harvard Law School made the same decision on Wednesday.

They’ll join the Harvard Academic Workers contingent of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, which represents about 100,000 academic workers across the country.

“Harvard is incredibly decentralized and we’re often kept away from each other,” Morgan Gilman, a research associate at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement. “Building our union required us to build bridges across these barriers, and with every wall we knocked down, we found more and more support from coworkers struggling for workplace justice.”

The workers’ win adds to organizing efforts at Harvard, where graduate student employees won their first union contract in 2021. Undergraduate workers voted to form a union last fall.

Harvard faculty members began discussing a union as early in 2018. Interest escalated in the early days of COVID, and the unit went public in February 2023 and began signing authorization cards.

Brandan Mancilla, director of UAW Region 9A, which includes New England, called the vote “yet another historic election for UAW academic workers.”

In the last two weeks, around 4,600 workers — including graduate workers at the University of Vermont and New Hampshire and resident advisors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute — have unionized with UAW.

Organizers said in a statement that they hope to address term limits for their employment, stagnant wages, working hours, inadequate parental supports for workers with families, and discrimination protections in the forthcoming contract.