POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

In a post for Talking Union, Paul Garver provides details on the decision of Harvard University to recognize and to bargain with the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Automobile Workers.

Some of the basic details of the vote on unionization are not especially surprising:

Of the ca. 5000 eligible Harvard graduate students/research assistants and teaching fellows 1931 voted for union representation to 1523 against.

The union had narrowly lost a previous election held in November 2016.  The election was rerun in response to an appeal to the NLRB from the UAW because Harvard had violated the Excelsior rule by failing to supply with union with accurate eligibility lists.

The No vote remained constant between the two elections, but the Yes vote gained 500.   According to an extensive exit poll conducted by the staff of the Harvard Crimson, most new voters voted yes.

The exit poll revealed results that were both expected and surprising.

The strongest pro-union votes came from graduate students in arts and humanities (91% in favor), social sciences (88.5%), and the professional schools of government (91%), education (90%), public health (89%), law (88.5%) and design (81%).

Fewest yes votes came from engineering/applied sciences (28%), medicine (38.5%) and sciences (49.7%).   Students from the overall Graduate School of Arts & Sciences voted 66.4%, while those from Harvard College only 48.5%. Older students voted more pro-union than younger ones (83% if 29-33, 66.6% from 23-28, 47.5% from 18-22).

The low support from those 18-22 years old likely reflects the limited experience, as well as the smaller total number, within that age group. Harvard may not be the best sample group, but most recent polling has suggested that Americans under 35 have a stronger sense of the importance of unions and a stronger interest in unionizing than those in older age groups.

Garver also notes that “Harvard is breaking with elite private universities like Columbia, Yale and Chicago who are refusing to bargain with unions of graduate students, in the expectation that the Supreme Court will overturn the 2016 NLRB ruling that graduate students could form a union and bargain collectively” and that “other graduate student organizing efforts in the Boston area have redoubled efforts to organize and bargain, correctly assessing that formal law is not their ally.”

Here is the photo at the top of the new union’s web page:

The complete post is available at: https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/harvard-will-bargain-with-grad-students-union-other-boston-area-students-encouraged/.