68 Billion on the Shelf: Harvard's Graduate Students Strike Again

At midnight Tuesday, October 27, the graduate student workers of Harvard University walked off the job. The Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU), part of UAW Local 5118 and representing more than 4,000 research assistants and teaching fellows, began its second strike of the year after a year and a half without a contract and more than 35 bargaining sessions that produced no agreement. In a nine-day vote, 1,710 members cast ballots and 88 percent of them — a supermajority — authorized the walkout.

The picket lines now run in front of one of the richest institutions on earth. Harvard's endowment closed fiscal year 2026 at nearly $68 billion. That is more money held by a single university than the annual budget of most states.

A Strike That Has Already Won Twice

This is not a strike of last resort. It is the second act of a long strike. In April, HGSU members walked out for 40 days — the longest walkout in the union's history and its third since winning recognition, breaking the 29-day record set during the December 2019 walkout. The spring strike ended in June without a contract, but with a clear ledger: it forced Harvard to the table on pay parity between teaching fellows and research assistants, moved paid leave forward, and over the summer the two sides closed seven contract articles. Those are real, enforceable wins — anti-retaliation protections that can be grieved through an independent process, a longer window for filing grievances, appointment letters that finally say who is paying the worker.

The union is open about what produces results at Harvard. Its own history notes that the last contract, settled in 2021, came only after the threat of a second strike. In spring, graduate students showed the university, for 40 days, how much of its academic mission runs on their labor — classes untaught, sections ungraded, research standing still — and the university moved. The 40-day strike, the union wrote, was not ended because the fight was over. It was ended because the fight had changed.

Safe Work, Fair Pay, the Right to Stay

The new contract campaign runs on three demands. Safe work: one in five student workers, by the union president's account, has reported experiencing harassment or discrimination. HGSU wants an independent, grievable process for those claims and a transition support program — modeled on MIT's — that guarantees a semester of support to a research assistant who has to leave a hostile lab. Harvard's current proposal makes supportive measures un-grievable and leaves the transition program out of the contract entirely.

Fair pay: teaching fellows doing a standard two-section teaching load earn less than research assistants doing comparable hours, and Harvard has gone a year and a half without any raise. The university's latest offer is a 6.1 percent raise upon ratification, then 3 percent a year with no cost-of-living adjustment, locked into a five-year term. HGSU wants a three-year contract, retroactive pay for the contractless months, true parity, and its union-run benefit funds restored. Those funds — roughly $3 million covering healthcare, dental, child care, legal costs, and immigration expenses — have been defunded since the contract expired in July 2025. Thirteen workers testified at the table that the funds were the only reason they could afford care. Harvard's replacement, a university-controlled hardship fund, has not funded the same expenses: one bargaining committee member applied as a test case and was denied.

The right to stay: for the non-citizen workers in the unit, the fight is over Article 13 — protections for non-citizen workers, including time to resolve visa problems abroad without losing their positions, and Harvard's own Office of General Counsel guidelines on responding to immigration enforcement written into the contract. Harvard says it follows those guidelines but refuses to commit to them in writing, because it wants to preserve the freedom to change them later.

The Richest University in the World

The arithmetic is the whole story. HGSU vice president Evan Lemire made the case in one sentence:

"Harvard's endowment has now grown to a mind-boggling 68 billion dollars. The richest university in the world can afford to pay its workers."

Harvard's response has been to call the strike "unwarranted." In a Monday email to the community, Provost John Manning and Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick pointed to the 6.1 percent offer and the university's "unwavering commitment." But commitment without movement is just a calendar. For three bargaining sessions this fall, Harvard brought nothing to the table — no counters, no questions, no language — and only produced new proposals after the membership began voting on a strike. As the union's post-session debrief puts it: Harvard moves when we make them.

The university has also threatened the strike with its legal armor. In an October 2 letter to faculty, Harvard's labor office warned that a second walkout supporting the same goals as the spring strike could be treated as an unprotected "intermittent" strike, subjecting student workers to "the full range of employment consequences." On the advice of its lawyers, HGSU called the warning unlawful and the claims spurious — and struck anyway.

A Wave, Not a Blip

Harvard's grad students are not striking alone, and they know it. Last week, the university's dining workers — UNITE HERE Local 26, working without a contract since June — voted overwhelmingly to authorize their own strike. The union representing Harvard's academic workers, around 2,600 researchers and instructors, has set a November 10 strike deadline. And at neighboring MIT, graduate student workers (United Electrical Workers Local 256, where 92 percent of voting members authorized a strike) and facilities workers (SEIU Local 32BJ) are preparing a possible joint strike against a $29.2 billion endowment.

HGSU president Denish Jaswal, at the kickoff rally, framed what the picket line is for: "Harvard has three strike threats this fall, and it's because they're poorly negotiating with thousands of workers." What is on the line is not one university's budget. It is the question of who gets to decide what the people who do the teaching, the grading, and the research are worth — the people in the moneyed institution, or the people in the work.

The answer, on a Tuesday midnight in Cambridge, came from the people in the work. The ledger is open, the endowment is sitting there, and for the second time this year, the grad students have made Harvard do the math.