The pandemic has affected all avenues of American life as we know it. Harvard too has felt its vice grip close around the previous norms the University took for granted — everyday operations, the traditional delights of an in-person college experience, and the ability for diverse members of the community to work together to ensure each school year reaches its full potential. This feature, however, takes a deeper look at a population of the Harvard community frequently overlooked in the University’s dominant conversation: workers and union leaders who tirelessly advocate for the protection and security of University employees.
I was fortunate enough to sit down and speak with three union leaders: Carrie Barbash, a union leader for the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers; Brandon Mancilla, president of the Harvard Graduate Student Union; and Craig Leonard, CEO of the Harvard Employees Credit Union. Through our conversations, Barbash, Mancilla, and Leonard explained the functions of their organizations in normal times, as well as how they and their workers persevered through the pandemic. Perhaps most inspiringly, their voices shed light on the critical contributions these employees make to our everyday experiences as undergraduates of the College, and the tenacity these communities have demonstrated in their transition to the new normal.
The feature presents unfiltered quotes from my three conversations with Barbash, Mancilla, and Leonard. Though brief analysis follows their statements, I chose to leave their excerpts substantively unedited to ensure their voices were highlighted as they were — without editorial alteration and the potential risk of narrativizing a story that was not my own. The key takeaway from the three conversations? The importance of recognizing the value of Harvard employees and the potential that undergraduate students have to amplify these workers’ voices and celebrate their contributions.
Harvard Political Review: What is your union’s mission, what does it do?
Carrie Barbash (HUCTW): Our union’s mission is to give workers and staff a voice in decisions that affect their working lives. That can range from things like having your pay cut or being laid off, but also to what your job structure looks like, what kind of hours you work, whether you work from home, your work-life balance, [and if] you’ve taken on additional responsibilities and you want to apply for a job reclassification. A lot of these decisions prior to there being a union for these workers at Harvard were just made unilaterally by a supervisor. When the union was voted in in 1988, people finally had a way to have input in those decisions, real input that could affect the outcome of those decisions — being in a union is an opportunity to have impactful input into the decisions that affect your working life.
Brandon Mancilla (HGSU): That’s a big question. We’re a union of approximately 5,000 student workers at any given time during the semester. Our union is an organization of those 5,000 workers looking to improve our working conditions, our pay, and shift the balance of power away from administrators and faculty towards student workers at the University. Among our major demands are a fair living wage given that the city is very expensive and the cost of living continues to go up, expansive and comprehensive health care coverage including dental, and a fair recourse to deal with issues of identity and power-based harassment and discrimination.
Craig Leonard (HUECU): The Credit Union really serves the Harvard community, and includes a pretty wide audience now. It was originally established strictly for employees, but over the years it’s grown to include faculty, students, alumni, employees of Harvard as well as all of its affiliates, which includes the teaching hospitals, so we have a fairly sizable membership within the medical community largely with Mass General Hospital. We’re a financial institution that delivers pretty traditional products, services, savings, and loan products to the Harvard community. So when you see the “union” part of our name, it doesn’t have anything to do with a unionized workforce — a credit union is just another financial type of institution, it’s an alternative to a bank. Really what we’re about is being a trusted partner. We are big believers of being transparent, and part of our mission is to provide better deposit rates for our members as well as better loan rates to our borrowers. We are a not-for-profit organization, so profit doesn’t drive our decisions. We’re really in for creating long-term partnerships with our membership.
HPR: How have your union’s operations been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic?
Carrie Barbash (HUCTW): We normally would get to know members by going into their workspace and introducing ourselves, chatting with them there, or having meetings in their departments’ meeting rooms with them. We prefer to do that in person, it just feels like it helps build trust to meet someone and get to know them properly. Having Zoom, however, has been interesting because it has brought other people to meetings who weren’t necessarily comfortable coming to meetings before, or for whom it was hard to travel during the time they had free during the day, and now it’s much easier to just pop on Zoom. I think it’s helped in some ways build connections with people we wouldn’t have otherwise had connections with. I don’t think anything has changed the mission of the Union — we’re still helping members advocate for themselves in the workplace. That’s a huge part of what we do, as well as advocating for members ourselves.
Craig Leonard (HUECU): Things certainly changed a lot. From a work standpoint, everyone went remote. Our staff is still largely remote today, and we’re talking about what the new normal will be after this — we’re probably going to adopt some type of hybrid workforce. What’s changed dramatically from our business, and I think for consumers in general, is this big shift. I think that’s going to have long-term impacts depending on where you are within the different kinds of careers out there. Certainly there’s a group of workers who couldn’t do what our staff would do — they didn’t have the abilities to work remotely. So that’s changed our organization substantially. When you look just beyond our own organization, and maybe Harvard and other industries beyond that, it’s going to have long-lasting effects similar to what we’re experiencing. You have this paradigm shift in what the new back-to-work life is going to look like for a lot of people.
HPR: Could you describe some of the large-scale financial patterns the Credit Union has witnessed throughout the progression of the pandemic?
Craig Leonard (HUECU): We witnessed an incredible spike in financial assistance during that March and April time period in particular. Over the last period, we’ve helped over 700 members totaling about $25 million worth of loan products who have reached out to us needing assistance. And that’s everything from asking if they can miss a payment or multiple payments to helping us modify mortgages. A good part of that was out to student loan borrowers, who have really struggled through this. There’s a lot in the news about the issues around student loan debt in particular. We help wherever we can, and we’ll continue to do so, but things are — at least with what we’re seeing — in a much better position than they were back in that March-to-May time period. The requests that we’re seeing now are minimal compared to what we were experiencing at that point.
HPR: How have you been personally affected by the pandemic?
Brandon Mancilla (HGSU): I personally faced a lot of tragedy early on. I lost a grandfather and some other family friends to the illness, so this has been a very stressful, very traumatizing, very tragic year for me personally. But throughout it all, I’ve thrown myself into union organizing because it’s been a very empowering part of my life … in a situation in which you feel like everything is outside of your control and everything is kind of blowing up, if you’re involved in a collective effort, it brings a sense of relief, a sense of peace, even if it is a lot of work and a lot of stress and you are taking on more issues. At the very least, you feel as though you can do something about this. So that’s been my personal journey throughout this year. At this point, I’m very [much] looking forward to the opportunity to return to campus and move on from this year. Nothing is going to be the same, I think, from where we were 13 months ago, but I do think I have reached a point where I think I’m just ready for a new page to turn.
HPR: What is a pre-existing issue that Harvard workers faced before the pandemic that they continue to grapple with in the new normal?
Brandon Mancilla (HGSU): Grad students face a lot of issues. We put a lot of work in, we make a lot of money for the university, and we perform lots of different kinds of labor. Oftentimes, that is not fairly compensated and our issues are often lower on the priority list for higher-up administrators. Additionally, for too long, the University has insisted on using a very flawed Title IX and internal processes for dealing with power-based harassment and discrimination when unfortunately, these internal processes only protect the abusers, faculty members, and administrators in question. We believe that an independent third-party grievance procedure which would lead to a neutral arbitration process would be the best way to deal with these issues when they happen in the classroom, workplace, labs, and offices. These have been along the lines of our demands and they split between what are traditionally called bread-and-butter issues like paying and healthcare, and things that are considered power-based issues around harassment, discrimination, and work culture.
HPR: As a leader within your organization, what have been some of the most fulfilling aspects of the position despite the difficulties of the present moment?
Brandon Mancilla (HGSU): Whenever we get to help someone resolve an issue is a great feeling. Oftentimes, especially [in] the way the media covers labor struggles, it’s all about a contract. That’s very important, but on the other hand, unions are supposed to empower workers and resolve issues that they face in the workplace. And I think when you’re too focused on something bigger and abstract like a contract, that can get lost. The most satisfying thing above all has just been seeing that yes, student workers at Harvard need a union. For years we were having that argument with the University, amongst ourselves, during our elections, and when we were trying to convince people to go on strike. You know, what’s the point of this? What’s the purpose of this? Will this really help? We’re learning now through trial, error, and practice that yes — it’s absolutely essential.
Carrie Barbush (HUCTW): It’s a really nice feeling when you meet with a member who is very freaked out and upset by a situation, and you can clearly see that [over] the course of the conversation they’re so much more confident and so much more calm. Just to be able to empower people to advocate for themselves, and to let people know that they feel that they have support and a community around them and protection — that’s an amazing part of this job that I would say all my coworkers would say is one of the most rewarding things. We all like negotiating contracts. That’s very interesting and challenging work, certainly, but at times that feels nothing but hard, whereas working one-on-one with members is not like that because we have such smart, creative, kind members who bring really interesting challenges and are often so thoughtful and thankful for our help. You really feel like you’re making a difference.
Craig Leonard (HUECU): The resiliency of our staff, and the way that they’ve been able to adapt through this. We asked people to perform and work very differently than what they’ve been accustomed to, and we kind of had to flip a switch in terms of the speed that we needed to pivot in a different direction. They’ve been just truly amazing through this whole experience to the point now where we’ve really asked ourselves, “What is our back-to-work structure going [to] look like?” They’ve performed so well. A lot of people have gotten accustomed to working remotely, and a lot of them enjoy it, so we’re trying to figure out what that new work-life balance is going to be. But I would say their ability to adapt, almost instantaneously, has been the most surprising and gratifying aspect to me.
HPR: What would you like to make aware to the greater Harvard community about unions that may not be known to many students and faculty?
Carrie Barbash (HUCTW): People have a tendency to speak as if faculty and students are the entirety of the University. The things that happen on the Harvard campus to make it run — to make classes happen, to make research happen — would not happen without all the staff in our union. When we say, “Harvard works because we do,” that is really true. We have members in every single department on campus. All of the faculty on campus have one of our faculty assistants. All of the administrative, finance, and developmental offices on campus have our members working there. People have a tendency to kind of say, “There’s this kind of administrative sect, and then there’s the real work of the faculty and students.” The two things are not separate. On a campus this size and with such an impressive University trying to do so much, you need all of these staff in order to get these things done.
Brandon Mancilla (HGSU): The workers you interact with have a voice. They have interests, they have priorities, they have demands, and they’re working to improve those working conditions. Student support is crucial for all this. Student voices matter, especially college students. College students matter a ton in terms of shaping Harvard’s decision making. If the college students and their parents are not on board with something, that’s what changes higher-up administrators’ minds. In a way, we think that the college students should start thinking of themselves as a union — you are a collective body, you’re not just a bunch of individuals who are taking classes and getting a degree. Even if it’s just public opinion amongst you, you have an impact: We easily saw how that worked out with the COVID moveout. All of this shows that if college students are able to stand with us graduate students and with the rest of campus workers, we would win some pretty interesting stuff at Harvard.
Concluding Thoughts:
By speaking with three individuals involved in Harvard’s collective organizing scene, it is clear that there is a great degree of nuance and diversity among unions. While Barbash works for an organization protecting the rights of clerical and technical workers, Manchilla advocates on behalf of half of Harvard graduate students who are juggling both their responsibilities as scholars and employees. Leonard’s credit union, on the other hand, is far from the traditional union. Instead, it is a financial institution that partners with members of the Harvard community, particularly workers of the University, and provides them with financial benefits.
However, a recurrent theme throughout these conversations was that the University’s culture tends to emphasize the accomplishments of students and scholars, but may not recognize the other numerous workers who are doing just as much to ensure Harvard runs as smoothly as possible. Barbash pointed out that just about every single office and department has clerical and technical workers, and that without their services, the logistical elements which allow classes to run, labs to operate, and faculty to teach their courses would be severely affected. Mancilla spoke to the mounting pressures of graduate student workers, particularly during the pandemic, to navigate cancelled research opportunities, difficult financial situations, and independent scholarship all at once. He also shed light on the problematic power dynamics within many institutional structures, including at times the relationships between faculty and students, and how the Graduate Student Union works to advocate for those most vulnerable.
Leonard and Barbash also noted the large shift to remote employment, and their belief that this new way of working may be here to stay. Not only do some workers enjoy operating in their own spaces, but it also saves a great deal of time for those who have to commute to Cambridge daily. Perhaps most notably, all three organization leaders emphasized that one of, if not the most, fulfilling aspects of their job was witnessing the resilience of those they represented. If anything, the pandemic has further elucidated the perseverance of Harvard employees and calls necessary attention to the unique challenges they face. These employees, who will continue making a tangible difference come the fall semester, deserve the recognition and appreciation of all members of the Harvard community.
