Around New England
Union Vote By Undergraduate Workers At Harvard Hampered By ‘Dead Names’
October 26, 2023
Undergraduate students at Harvard College who work part-time for the school have voted overwhelmingly to form a union.
The tally as of Wednesday, October 25 was 153-1, according to the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, which also reported:
The official voter rolls also included multiple students’ dead names, despite having preferred names listed on the University’s official directory, Harvard Connections. HUWU organizer Syd D. Sanders ’24, who was listed by his dead name, said the errors have made organizing harder.
“They should know what people’s names are,” Sanders said. “But they gave everyone’s dead names, which then when we’re doing text banking means that we’ve accidentally dead named people, which is obviously a bad experience.”
A university spokesman “did not comment on how the lists were created,” according to the newspaper.
“Dead name” is a term that refers to the name a student’s parents gave the student shortly after birth, which the student has since rejected, usually because the student now identifies with a gender other than the one that corresponds to the student’s biological sex.
The new unionized collective bargaining unit, to be called Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union-United Automobile Workers, will include at least 400 students who work at Harvard’s libraries, cafes, pub, “and the University’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion offices,” according to the newspaper.
It doesn’t include dorm crew, a program through which students were paid to clear dorm bathrooms from 1951 to until 2020, because the university phased out those jobs during the coronavirus shutdowns. The program became controversial after an education professor at Temple University criticized it in a tweet in April 2019, implying it was demeaning for what she called “Low-income students at HARVARD” to clean other students’ bathrooms.
In April 2018, graduate students at Harvard University voted to form a union.
If the National Labor Relations Board certifies the undergraduate workers union vote, as expected, the existing graduate students union and the new undergraduate workers union “will share an executive committee in control of the union finances but will bargain for separate contracts with the University,” the student newspaper reported.
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