Over 4,000 UAW members on strike at Harvard University

After 14 months of fruitless contract negotiations with the Harvard University administration, over 4,000 workers represented by the Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) walked off the job on an indefinite strike on April 21. According to the union, "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 rising 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." In this episode of Working People, we speak with three striking graduate student workers about the issues at the center of this strike, and about what it's like to live, work, and strike at the country's richest university amid political attacks from the federal government, scandals connecting high-ranking Harvard officials to Jeffrey Epstein, and a nationwide cost-of-living crisis.

Panelists include: Sara Speller, a fifth-year PhD student in the Music Department at Harvard and president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union; Zoë Feder, a seventh-year PhD student in the program in Biological & Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School and a research assistant in the Microbiology Department; and Jacob Wolf, a third-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Additional links/info:

Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) website, Facebook page, X/Twitter page, TikTok, and Instagram
Harvard Graduate Students Union Strike Update/FAQ Zine
Lydialyle Gibson, Harvard Magazine, "Harvard graduate student workers strike"
Noah A. Ferris, The Harvard Crimson, "Grad students rally outside Garber's home as strike enters third week"
Hugo C. Chiasson & Elise A. Spenner, The Harvard Crimson, "Harvard promised a 'full' review of its Epstein ties. Its own files reveal what it left out"

Featured Music:

Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song

Credits:

Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(397)

Oil giant BP locks out workers at its last unionized refinery in US

For the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum (BP) has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The facility, located on the southwestern shore of Lake...

10 Aug 50min

Railroad jobs have "gotten worse" since Biden and Congress blocked workers from striking

In 2022, the United States nearly experienced its first national railroad strike in decades, until then-President Joe Biden, along with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, stepped in to block a str...

5 Aug 1h

Corporate profiteers destroyed journalism. Worker-owned media can save it.

When workers at the historic Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper hit the picket line in October of 2022, they had no idea that they would be on strike for over three years—or that the strike would end w...

30 Jul 36min

Data centers are not a "red state" or "blue state" problem; they're a working-class problem

In so-called "red states" and "blue states" around the US, from rural areas to urban centers, the explosion of new data center projects is impacting residents in poor, working-class, and middle-class ...

15 Jul 1h 15min

Train crashes destroyed their towns. Will yours be next?

10 years before the catastrophic train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, one of the deadliest rail disasters in North American history took place in the Canadian town of Lac-Mé...

6 Jul 1h 12min

Toxic Avengers: America's poisoned and abandoned communities must stand together or die

From the explosion of AI data centers to the increasing number of toxic spills, explosions, and industrial disasters happening across the country, corporations and the government are turning the USA i...

1 Jul 1h 8min

UAW becomes first major union to divest from Israel

At the 39th Constitutional Convention of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Detroit, Michigan, union delegates debated and affirmed the aggressive direction the UAW has taken under current President Sha...

26 Jun 1h 4min

FBI raids homes of Michigan students and workers for Palestine activism

On June 10, early in the morning, FBI agents raided the homes of individuals involved in Palestine solidarity activism at the University of Michigan. As Yarden Katz and Stephen M. Ward report at Mondo...

24 Jun 25min