Last Day of SEIU 32BJ Harvard Janitors' Contract

Students and janitors rally on Thursday, November 10. Photo Credit: Grace Z. Li, Harvard Crimson

Today is the last day of the contract that covers approximately 700 janitors at Harvard, who are represented by SEIU 32BJ. Last week, Harvard janitors voted overwhelmingly in favor of a strike if the union and the university are unable to reach an agreement on the contract by the end of today. The janitors' demands include affordable healthcare, raises, and more full-time work.The approximately 300 security guards at Harvard are also represented by SEIU 32BJ and are engaged in contract negotiations. Harvard employs its security guards through the subcontractor Securitas. Security guards and Securitas have agreed to extend the contract until December 1 to allow for more time to bargain.

Victory at Harvard! Workers Settle Strike with a Winning Contract

HUDS workers celebrate their new contract. Photo Credit: UNITE HERE Local 26

After a three week long strike, over 700 Harvard dining workers settled their contract with the Harvard University on October 25, 2016. After months of negotiations, over 700 Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) workers represented by UNITE HERE Local 26 went on strike at 6AM on October 5, 2016. HUDS workers’ new contract meets all of their demands: a $35,000 per year base salary for full-time workers, no increases in healthcare costs, and more opportunities for year-round work. For more on the contract, please the WBUR interview with Brian Lang here.

The NE JLC was active in supporting HUDS workers throughout their fight. We joined workers on the picket line, rallied, and supported students organizing in solidarity with workers. NE JLC Campus Initiative Fellow Grace Evans and former Fellow Gabe Hodgkins helped lead the solidarity efforts of the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM). Our annual community meeting focused on the HUDS strike, where we were honored to hear from three HUDS workers, Aaron Ducket, Annabella Pappas, and Chris Pappas, as well as from Brian Lang, President of Local 26. We collected almost $400 for the HUDS strike assistance fund. NE JLC Board Co-Chair Don Siegel wrote a letter for The Harvard Crimson in support of the strike.

Harvard and Dining Workers Reach 'Tentative Agreement'

Union supporters gather outside of 124 Mount Auburn St. during the Monday's protests. Photo Credit: Thomas W. FranckBy BRANDON J. DIXON, HANNAH NATANSON, and LEAH S. YARED, CRIMSON STAFF WRITERSUPDATED: October 25, 2016, at 2:59 a.m.Harvard and its dining workers reached a “tentative agreement” around 1:05 a.m. Tuesday morning—the closest the two parties have come to a contract settlement during months of tense negotiations.Brian Lang, president of UNITE HERE Local 26—the Boston-based union that represents Harvard’s dining workers—said the accord “accomplished all of our goals.” The deal is yet to be ratified; it must first be sent to a 30-member bargaining subcommittee Tuesday, Lang added, before the full membership of dining workers in the union vote on the deal Wednesday.Though he declined to provide specific details on the agreement, Lang said HUDS employees could return to work as early as Thursday. According to an email sent last week by College Dean for Finance and Administration Sheila C. Thimba, it will take at most two days from the official end of the strike before the University’s dining halls can resume “normal operations.”University spokesperson Tania deLuzuriaga wrote in an email that further details about the agreement would be forthcoming Tuesday morning.Protesters greeted news of the tentative deal with cheers and jubilation outside 124 Mt. Auburn St., the Harvard office building where Monday’s negotiations took place.“I’m feeling great about it, everything feels good,” dining services worker William H. Sawyer, who participated in the negotiation process, said at around 1:30 a.m. as he prepared to bike home. “The students and everyone behind us [have] been really inspirational… they kept us up, up, up, up and alive about this.”“Even right now, they still here,” he added, pointing to the handful of students—all members of the Student Labor Action Movement—who remained outside the building, shouting and jumping up and down in celebration in the wee hours of the morning. “Everybody else gone home.”In early October, HUDS workers launched an unprecedented strike—their first to take place during the academic year—calling on the University to increase wages and to maintain the current health benefits package it offers to dining hall employees. The last HUDS strike occurred more than 30 years ago.The tentative agreement came after a day of intense picketing and rallying by both HUDS workers and student supporters. More than 500 students walked out of class—the second walkout of the strike—before marching to 124 Mt. Auburn St. for a sit-in that lasted late into the night, wrapping up around 10:30 p.m. at the urging of police officers.By the time Harvard affiliates and union negotiators announced their tentative agreement, only a small cohort of students remained outside the building, along with a few HUDS workers. At one point during the night, students and strikers joined hands and marched in a circle, singing “We Shall Overcome.”Abhinav Reddy, a School of Public Health student and graduate student union organizer, described the final moments of the night. Local 26’s bargaining team joined the demonstrators remaining outside, he said, and “everyone gathered back up and started chanting.”“You could just see it on their faces before they even said anything,” Reddy said. “And everybody was like screaming and yelling, and then they said ‘we won, we got it.’”SLAM member Grace F. Evans ’19, also present at the negotiations’ conclusion, said workers came out of the building visibly emotional before Lang announced to the assembled crowd of supporters that the union had “won.”“It was a really emotional moment,” she said. “The workers were crying but Brian Lang was smiling, so we knew it was good news.”Reflecting on the day’s events, Evans said she felt students had been important to HUDS workers’ success, a sentiment some workers echoed.“It was definitely powerful that we were here,” Evans said, referring to the earlier lobby sit-in. “The negotiators looked down and they saw that.”Hundreds of students and HUDS supporters marched into 124 Mount Auburn Street, home to several Harvard offices, where negotiations over contracts continue Monday afternoon. Communication between Harvard and UNITE HERE Local 26 is being facilitated through mediators.The nearly three-week long strike shook Harvard’s campus, led to multiple dining hall closures, and spurred waves of student activism and nation-wide support. At the largest strike event Saturday, more than 1,000 HUDS workers and supporters marched to Cambridge City Hall.Edward B. Childs, a dining services workers who picketed from 7 a.m Monday morning until around 1 a.m Tuesday, said he had suspected Monday’s negotiation session would be fruitful.“Well, with the escalation we had this weekend and today, I was expecting something,” Childs said. “I knew something had to break.”Hundreds of students and HUDS supporters marched into 124 Mount Auburn Street, home to several Harvard offices, where negotiations over contracts continue Monday afternoon. Communication between Harvard and UNITE HERE Local 26 is being facilitated through mediators. Photo Credit: Thomas W. Franck via The Harvard Crimson

New York Times Op-Ed: Struggling to Serve at the Nation’s Richest University

by Rosa Ines Rivera*Cambridge, Mass. — I’ve been at Harvard University for 17 years, but I’ve never been in a classroom here. I’m a cook in the dining halls. I work in the cafeteria at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where every day I serve amazing students studying medicine, nutrition and child welfare, as well as the doctors and researchers who train them.While I’ve earned no college credits here, I’ve had a lesson in hypocrisy.On my way to work each morning, I pass a building with the inscription: “The highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.” If Harvard believes this, why is the administration asking dining hall workers to pay even more for our health care even though some of us pay as much as $4,000 a year in premiums alone?I serve the people who created Obamacare, people who treat epidemics and devise ways to make the world healthier and more humane. But I can’t afford the health care plan Harvard wants us to accept.That’s why I have been on strike with 750 co-workers for more than two weeks. That’s why the other day, co-workers and I were arrested after we sat down in Harvard Square, blocking traffic, in an act of civil disobedience. And that’s why the medical school students, in their white coats, have been walking the picket line with us in solidarity.The co-pays alone can be a problem. When a doctor told me my daughter had failed a hearing test and might need surgery, I thought about what care I could do without. I recently skipped an appointment to have a spot on my lung checked for cancer to save on the co-pays.Medical students analyzed Harvard’s proposal and found that the cost of premiums alone could eat up almost 10 percent of my income. And Harvard wants to increase our co-pays for every single doctor visit to $25, from $15, for primary care and to $100, from zero, for outpatient hospital care and some tests. Some costs would be reimbursed for lower-income workers, but out-of-pocket expenses would still be hard to meet.The students say that Harvard’s proposal is unaffordable for nearly all of us according to state government guidelines. If it goes through, I will keep avoiding the doctor to save that money for my kids’ co-pays. Any increase puts me at the breaking point.Harvard is the richest university in the nation, with a $35 billion endowment. But I can’t live on what Harvard pays me. I take home between $430 and $480 a week, and this August, I fell behind on my $1,150 rent and lost my apartment. Now my two kids and I are staying with my mother in public housing, with all four of us sharing a single bedroom. I grew up in the projects and on welfare. I want my 8-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son to climb out of the cycle of poverty. But for most of my time at Harvard it’s been hard.The average dining hall worker makes $31,193 a year, higher than other cafeterias in the area, but it still doesn’t go far around Boston. That’s why we’re asking for an annual salary of $35,000 for some financial stability, particularly since most dining halls are open only during the school year. Right now I’m lucky to work in one of the few cafeterias that’s open all year.I know that health care costs are going up everywhere, and I don’t have all the answers. But there must be some way not to shift costs onto Harvard’s poorest workers.If good health is truly “one of the fundamental rights of every human being,” then shouldn’t that also apply to the human beings working in Harvard’s cafeterias?*Rosa Ines Rivera, a member of Unite Here Local 26, is a dining hall worker at Harvard University. Article via The New York Times.

Harvard Crimson Letter to the Editor by Don Siegel, NE JLC Co-Chair

Image credit: UNITE HERE Local 26, which represents the Harvard University Dining Services workers

By Don Siegel, Co-Chair of the New England Jewish Labor Committee

Originally published in the Harvard Crimson. Read the original here.

To the Editor:

It is always sad when a great university misses a significant teaching moment. The prolonged strike of food service workers at Harvard is an example of just such a missed opportunity.

Press reports indicate that negotiators are bogged down over two issues: a guaranteed annual income for full-time staffers and health insurance. The first derives from the seasonal nature of the academic year and the inability of many Harvard food service workers to collect unemployment benefits during seasonal layoffs. The second is a universal problem that has an outsized impact on low wage workers like the strikers.

When I studied at Harvard, labor relations greats were on the faculty. I studied with Derek Bok and Archibald Cox and Business School Professors James Healy and Thomas Kennedy. Over the decades since then Harvard has led the way in establishing reasonable-and in some cases generous-labor standards for its employees and its contractors.

Approximately 25 years ago, Harvard set an area wide precedent in the construction industry by entering into a wide ranging project labor agreement for university capital improvements. Brokered by the late John Dunlop, it set meaningful minimum area standards guarantees in exchange for a no-strike commitment on covered jobs. Billions of dollars of construction work has been completed under that agreement and its successors.

More recently Harvard extended its creative problem solving to service employees and service contractors. In an effort to avert a protracted custodians strike the University adopted a "parity policy" extending many of its own meaningful employment standards to its service providers. Not only did that step resolve a labor management dispute, it improved the wages and working conditions of hundreds of area workers and their families.

That creativity and ingenuity have yet to show their face in the negotiations to end this dispute. The University seems dug in and the workers feel disrespected. Local 26, on behalf of hundreds of longtime, loyal employees has brought legitimate issues to the employer's attention. The response has been disappointing and demoralizing.

As income inequality continues to grow surely the world's wealthiest university can take the steps necessary to address the legitimate needs of some of its lowest paid workers. Harvard has proven that it has the capability to creatively respond to the needs of its workers. It is time to prove that it still has the will to do so.

Donald J. Siegel, a 1971 Harvard Law School graduate, is an attorney in Boston at Segal Roitman, LLP.

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We encourage you to support the strike by attending the rally this Saturday at 3PM at the Cambridge Common park and by donating to the strike assistance fund, which provides striking dining workers with material assistance.

Showing Up for Harvard Workers

On October 5, Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) workers, represented by UNITE HERE Local 26, went on strike over stalled contract negotiations. They have two major demands: a guaranteed annual salary of $35,000 and affordable healthcare. Many HUDS workers don't get any hours during the summer when students leave and dining halls reduce service. Yet they are unable to collect unemployment. This leaves families struggling from May to September just to make ends meet. This is the first strike at Harvard in 33 years--it's critical that we show up and remain united during this historic moment. There are many ways we can support striking Harvard workers:

• Donate to the strike assistance fund to help provide material assistance to striking workers, who continue to need to buy food, make mortgage payments and rent, etc: bit.ly/harvardstrikefund
• Sign onto the Jewish community statement of support: tinyurl.com/Jewish-community-HUDS-support
• Show up on Saturday at 3PM for a major rally and march! 
• Join our email list and like our Facebook page for updates and ways to stay involved.
• Post to Facebook and tweet using the hashtag #SupportTheStrike.

 Read more about the strike:https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/oct/16/harvard-university-strike-dining-hall-workers-protesthttp://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/10/18/huds-supporters-walk-out/http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/10/15/huds-strike-traffic-streets/http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/10/13/huds-strike-scrutiny/http://www.wsj.com/articles/dining-hall-workers-strike-at-harvard-1475681707