Harvard Reaches Tentative Deal With Striking Dining Services Workers
“It’s a historic agreement. We’ve accomplished all the goals we set out to make.”
It looks like the school is going to concede and give dining services workers an annual salary of $35,000. Knowing the way unions operate, in a decade or less, you’ll be able to make $50K a year working in the Harvard dining hall.
Harvard Magazine reports:
University and Dining Workers Reach Tentative Agreement
WITHOUT DISCLOSING details, Harvard and UNITE HERE Local 26, the union that represents 750 Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) workers, announced early Tuesday morning that they had reached a tentative contract agreement. If approved, the new contract will end a nearly three-week-long strike and apparently satisfy the union’s main demands for a $35,000 minimum income for full-time workers and stable healthcare costs. The agreement follows a negotiation session that went past 1 A.M. this morning, after hundreds of students had marched out of classes on Monday and occupied the lobby of 124 Mount Auburn Street, where the negotiations were taking place. Last Saturday, in what would be the union’s largest protest, about 1,000 union members and supporters rallied in Cambridge.
“It’s a historic agreement. We’ve accomplished all the goals we set out to make,” said Local 26 president Brian Lang. “The $35,000 income has been accomplished, and [the goal of] no increases in healthcare costs has been accomplished. A variety of other things that we were able to accomplish will be good for the members and for our relationship with the University.”
Lang said the agreement includes “compensation for periods of prolonged recess,” but that the compensation won’t come in the form of stipends from the University—suggesting that workers may become eligible for public unemployment benefits during the summer months. Due to summer and winter breaks, as previously reported, most HUDS workers are only employed only seven and a half months of the year, and earn an average of less than $34,000 annually. A full-year income of at least $35,000 was thus a major sticking point in the negotiations.
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