Harvard Law, National Labor Relations Board, April 2024 Staff Talks Stall After 19 Months

Harvard Law School’s clinical staff union has reached agreement on only 6 of 43 contract articles after 19 months of bargaining, leaving disputes over pay, job security, academic freedom and non-citizen worker protections unresolved as of March 27, 2026.

The impasse centers on a bargaining unit that the National Labor Relations Board certified in April 2024 after a 62-3 vote. It covers clinical fellows, instructors, staff attorneys, social workers, managing attorneys and directors in Harvard Law’s clinical programs.

Those workers operate inside clinics that do more than train students. They also provide direct legal services, including deportation defense, asylum cases and refugee protection for low-income immigrants.

The bargaining unit sits under Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers, or HAW-UAW, which represents over 2,600 non-tenure-track workers. Negotiators meet every two weeks and have exchanged over 100 proposals, but they remain far apart on several articles that shape how the clinic system functions.

That matters because Harvard Law’s clinics are tied to both teaching and public-facing legal work. The school says its clinics give students hands-on legal experience through in-house and external placements, while its Immigration and Refugee Clinic has, for more than 30 years, advanced immigrants’ rights through direct representation and policy advocacy.

In immigration practice, continuity carries unusual weight. Court deadlines, filing windows and humanitarian timelines do not pause when a campus labor dispute drags on, and delays or turnover can affect how students are supervised and how clients are represented.

“committed to negotiating in good faith”

Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton said the university is “committed to negotiating in good faith,” adding that contracts built from scratch take time and that progress benefits students and instructors.

Union leaders have framed the fight as one about how Harvard values clinical teaching. Organizer Greening has argued that clinical education should be treated as equivalent to doctrinal teaching, while a March 24, 2026 teach-in by the HLS Clinicians Union and National Lawyers Guild cast the talks as evidence of an “outdated Harvard model” behind two-year delays.

Pay remains one of the clearest gaps. Harvard offered a $68,000 minimum starting salary for clinical fellows, while the union proposed a $86,500 minimum starting salary plus a raises framework in February 2026 and was awaiting a response.

Job security is another sticking point. Union proposals would limit non-renewal for presumptively renewable appointments, allow layoffs or hour reductions only in a “demonstrably bona fide” financial emergency, and set rules for discipline and dismissal.

Academic freedom also remains unsettled. The union introduced an expanded proposal in October 2024 that aligns with American Bar Association standards on instructors’ First Amendment rights.

The dispute reaches beyond payroll and contract language because Harvard Law’s clinic system serves an unusually international student body. The school says its one-year LL.M. program typically includes about 180 students from roughly 65 countries, while Harvard’s international office tracks large populations of students and scholars on F, J, and H visas.

For those students, practice-based legal education often runs on a compressed schedule. An LL.M. year leaves less room for disruption in clinic access, supervision or course planning than a longer degree path would.

That makes staffing stability more than an internal workplace question. Students who enter clinic-heavy programs often rely on predictable access to supervisors, regular case assignments and continuity in the teaching staff who guide asylum, deportation defense and refugee matters.

The same pressures apply to clients and outside groups that refer cases to law school clinics. Harvard’s immigration-focused programs handle matters that can involve active legal deadlines, and prolonged uncertainty over staffing can affect retention, workload and supervision even without a reported clinic cancellation.

No strike has occurred. Still, the broader labor climate at Harvard has sharpened attention on immigration-related protections and the terms of contingent academic work.

HAW-UAW opened a strike authorization vote in March 2026. The vote is open-ended and needs a 2/3 majority, and university-wide bargaining had reached agreement on 13 of 37 articles.

That broader campaign has kept non-citizen worker protections in view. Those protections appear among the unresolved issues in wider HAW-UAW talks, alongside time caps for non-tenure-track faculty, showing how immigration-related workplace concerns have moved into the center of academic labor negotiations rather than staying inside international offices.

At Harvard Law, that overlap is especially visible because the affected workers occupy hybrid roles. They teach students, supervise casework and provide legal services to clients and communities, blurring the line between academic instruction and frontline representation.

The structure of the unit reflects that blend. It includes clinical fellows, instructors, staff attorneys, social workers and certain managing attorneys and directors involved in Harvard Law clinical programs.

As bargaining drags on, the stakes stretch beyond Cambridge. Elite universities often set patterns that peer institutions watch closely, especially in clinics that schools use for recruitment, training and public-service delivery.

If Harvard’s clinicians are still negotiating first-contract basics nearly two years into the process, other schools may face pressure to spell out employment terms for clinicians before organizing drives or public disputes build. That question lands with special force in immigration and asylum clinics, where institutions often market hands-on advocacy while relying on non-tenure-track or mixed staff structures to run those programs.

The contract fight also shows how university labor disputes can shape who receives legal help. When clinics depend on workers still bargaining over foundational employment terms, service reliability becomes linked to labor structure as much as to curricular design.

For students weighing clinic-heavy programs, the dispute points to practical questions about how those programs operate. Prospective students may want to know who supervises the work, whether those roles rest on stable contracts and how much of a school’s immigration or refugee practice depends on staff still seeking a first agreement.

Partners and referring organizations face similar questions. If a clinic’s capacity depends heavily on contingent personnel or workers still trying to settle job protections, outside groups may need to monitor staffing levels and continuity as negotiations continue.

Harvard has said progress at the table benefits both students and instructors. The union, meanwhile, has portrayed the pace of negotiations as a test of whether the university will recognize the role clinicians play in legal education and public service.

Both sides are bargaining in a setting where the academic and the legal are tightly connected. The people covered by the unit do not work in a back-office function; they help train future lawyers while handling cases for people confronting deportation, asylum claims and other urgent immigration matters.

That connection is what gives the dispute wider force. A stalled contract at Harvard Law is not simply a campus employment story when the affected programs help foreign-trained lawyers build practice experience and give low-income immigrants direct representation.

The longer the first-contract talks remain unresolved, the more they illustrate a broader shift in higher education. Labor negotiations now reach into questions of immigration access, legal continuity and institutional capacity.

Harvard Law’s experience shows how employment structure can shape the daily operation of clinics that many students and clients depend on. In that sense, the battle that began with a National Labor Relations Board certification in April 2024 now speaks to something larger: who gets trained, who gets represented and how steady those systems remain when the people running them still lack a first contract.