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Harvard graduate student workers walked off the job on Tuesday in their second strike of 2026 — and other Harvard workers are set to follow with additional strikes in the coming weeks, as union activity heats up on campuses in the Boston area.

The Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers Local 5118 (HGSU), which represents over 4,000 student workers, began their strike at midnight on Tuesday. The strike comes five months after the union ended a six-week strike in the spring, which ended without a contract.

The union’s demands are “safe work, fair pay, and the right to stay”— meaning stronger grievance processes and the right to third-party arbitration in sexual harassment and discrimination cases; pay equity and wages on par with those for student workers at MIT and Brown University; and protections for non-citizen and disabled workers.

Sarah Johns, a member of HGSU’s bargaining committee, told Truthout that the union called off their first strike this year in May after some progress in contract negotiations with the university. But despite bargaining over the summer, “we were really disappointed in the lack of momentum from Harvard,” she said. As a result, “our membership voted that it was necessary to escalate this fight in order to get a contract.”

In a letter published on Tuesday, HGSU President Denish Jaswal wrote that Harvard had “refused to meaningfully engage” with the union and offered a “regressive contract worse than our last, stripping away millions in previously negotiated benefit funds” and removing protected classes from the contract, while also resorting to “anti-labor tactics.”

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“Our benefits have been completely gutted,” Johns told Truthout. “Harvard has cut over $3 million from our benefits funds that we had access to in our last contract. We also no longer have access to health care, dental, vision, and they also cut our parental benefits by 50 percent.”

Harvard grad student workers currently only have access to “emergency funds,” which do not cover costs for people with disabilities and chronic conditions, she said. Though HGSU had brought over a dozen student........

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