The HLS Clinicians Bargaining and Organizing Committees have developed these FAQs for the HLS community. Please reach out to hlsclinicians@gmail.com if you have questions that you feel should be addressed.
Last updated May 27, 2026.
The HLS Clinicians unit of Harvard Academic Workers-UAW is made up of 90+ people teaching and providing legal services in HLS’s in-house clinics and student practice organizations - primarily clinical instructors (some of whom also hold additional titles, like Assistant Director), as well as clinical fellows, staff attorneys, and social workers. A number of our members have been providing clinical legal education at HLS for decades - our longest serving member has been a clinical instructor for 45 years. We're people who love our jobs and feel passionate about serving our students, clients, and communities.
We formed a union because the status quo for clinicians at HLS is unsustainable. HLS has the largest clinical program in the country, and yet, it is the only reputable law school in which non-faculty staff perform the majority of core clinical faculty work. While we aren't seeking to become HLS faculty members through our union contract, we are seeking to narrow the gap between faculty pay and conditions and those of our members.
We have been negotiating our contract with the Harvard Administration since September 2024. We deserve a contract that establishes a fair, transparent, and comparable pay structure for clinicians, alongside terms that reflect the value that clinicians add to HLS. While we recognize Harvard University is currently facing significant financial uncertainty, our starting point is to put on the table proposals that reflect what we know clinicians merit.
We want to be a partner to HLS in reaching the goal of having the top clinical program in the country.
Great question! We have just the poster for you! Click here to download a poster to print and display.
If you are a student, feel free to display the poster in accordance with HLS policies; if you'd like a fancy union button to wear around campus, reach out to hlsclinicians@gmail.com.
If you are a former student, feel free to send us testimony of how clinicians impacted your law school experience and prepared you for your legal career. We appreciate all support in helping show the Administration the value our clinicians bring to the HLS community.
If you are a Harvard community member (e.g., faculty, staff, family member, prospective employer), we encourage you to let your support be known:
If you work in the area, we suggest you affix the poster to a visible location. For those who work at Harvard Law School, HLS policies say "items such as signs and posters may be affixed to the outward-facing side of office doors (including door frames), other workspace doors (including door frames), and cubicle walls. No such item may exceed 11 x 17 inches, nor may items be combined to create an image exceeding 11 x 17 inches." Our poster is letter sized (8.5 x 11 inches), so it's all good!
If you have a perspective or skillset that may be helpful to our contract negotiations and organizing, please e-mail us at hlsclinicians@gmail.com. If you want to show general support, share with Harvard administrators and the larger Harvard community why you support HLS Clinicians.
If you are a clinician colleague (e.g., a clinician working at another law school), consider signing this statement of support.
Want to stay in the loop on organizing efforts? E-mail us at hlsclinicians@gmail.com.
Progress towards a contract has been slow.
We held our union election in April 2024 and elected our bargaining committee (5 members) in May. In June, they sent a letter to the Administration requesting to begin negotiations. In July, the Administration proposed that our first negotiations be in September 2024.
That pattern continued. We regularly churned out proposals, only to wait months for counter proposals or wholesale rejections of articles with no meaningful explanation. By June 2025, our team had put all of our substantive contract proposals on the table.
The Administration offered an entire contract they could sign in April 2026; in addition to undefined terms and accidental reversions to earlier language - their contract was substantively unacceptable, as it offered minimal movement on key topics, including salaries.
As of May 26, 2026, we have had 32 bargaining sessions. We have a public bargaining tracker that includes copies of all article proposals and counter-proposals from both sides, as well as summaries of what we seek to achieve with each article and articles that have been wholesale rejected by the Administration. We have reached “tentative agreement” on 9 articles.
In May 2026, the Bargaining Committee learned that an e-mail was sent out to non-union employees of HLS, as well as members of this unit whose status has been challenged by the Administration as ‘supervisors’. The e-mail (sent in April) stated that they will be getting 3% raises (effective July 1) and bonuses (effective mid-June) and thanked them for the work they do for the law school. This email did not go out to unit members aside from those whose status has been challenged.
Our unit has received “non-union” emails in the past, as our terms and conditions of employment have to be negotiated with the union. In the meantime, before we reach a contract, labor law requires our employer to maintain status quo practices.
We asked the Administration whether unit members had inadvertently been omitted from the email’s distribution list, and we learned that the omission was intentional.
The Administration stated that, because we were ‘in negotiations’ that they would not be giving the annual increase or bonuses to the members of our unit (despite the fact we have been in negotiations for nearly two years and have otherwise been receiving the same treatment as non-union staff).
For historical context:
We elected to form a union in April 2024. The Bargaining Committee requested to begin negotiations in June 2024.
In July 2024, all staff in the unit received the non-union increase of 3.5% and a share of the bonus pool.
On June 5, 2024, the head of the Office of Labor and Employee Relations wrote the following email to the Bargaining Committee: “As you are probably aware, the law school’s practice is to provide an across-the-board wage increase each year, on or around July 1, as well as a portion of a bonus pool which is determined by the department heads. It is the law school’s intention to provide a 3.5% increase to all staff in the clinic, including the unit members, and to provide bonus payments in accordance with its prior practice. A school-wide message is forthcoming.”
Similarly, in July 2025, all staff in the unit received a share of the bonus pool and, in line with the approach HLS took to all non-union staff, no annual increase.
In September 2025, staff in the unit were informed that (like the rest of the Harvard non-union community) we would be seeing health insurance cost increases in Plan Year 2026, including premiums, copays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket maximums.
The Administration suggested that in order to get salary increases through other means, we could sign a contract by July 1st, based on the set of 28 articles they presented in April. We feel this is not realistic as the contract was substantively unacceptable and our interests remain far apart.
To sum up, we view the Administration’s actions as a unilateral and unjust departure from the status quo.
We note that clinical fellows have historically not been eligible for the raises and bonuses that other staff members have received. Putting fellows on an equal footing with other unit members in this area is one of the core priorities the Bargaining Committee has for this contract.
We often hear rhetoric about how indispensable and invaluable clinicians are to HLS–our experiences with students and clients often remind us how true that is. However, our salaries do not reflect the value we know we add to HLS.
According to a survey we circulated in summer 2024 (to which more than three-quarters of unit members responded), over 80% of HLS clinicians are dissatisfied with their pay. Clinicians at peer institutions are often not only paid more, but also receive benefits that we lack, such as paid sabbaticals. In fact, most HLS clinicians - even those who have been working in the HLS clinical programs for many years - are being paid within the *current* starting salary range for their same job titles.
Despite lower pay, HLS clinicians continue to dedicate themselves tirelessly to the HLS community. Two-thirds of our survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they regularly work over 40 hours a week; a third said that they regularly work over 50 hours a week. (For reference, our positions are officially listed - and paid time off calculated - at 35 hours a week.)
The added sting: a lot of this extra work lays outside our formal job descriptions and goes uncompensated. Clinicians do not get extra pay or a reduction in other duties for activities such as supervising externships, advising on written work, or academic service (such as sitting on committees).
The current starting salaries for clinicians are as follows:
Clinical Fellow: $68-75K
Clinical Instructor: $105-115K
Senior Clinical Instructor: Promotion from Clinical Instructor ( +$1500 added to base compensation)
Staff Attorney: $90-105K
Senior Staff Attorney: $105-115K or promotion
Social Worker: $90-100K
In our unit, the median salary for clinical instructors and senior clinical instructors (including those with additional titles, such as Assistant Directors) is around $118,000.
To justify current pay rates, the Administration has instead pointed to a 2022-23 nationwide survey of clinicians that found that in January 2023 the median pay for clinicians across the country was $120,000-129,999 and, for the northeastern United States (CT, MA, ME, RI, VT and NY, excluding New York City and Long Island) it was $110,000-119,000.
In addition to the data being three years’ old, we've also noted that in that same survey: for 34% of respondents the salary amount reflected a 9- or 10- month pay-period, rather than a 12-month pay period (as they are separately compensated for summer work, which we are not); 48% of respondents received paid sabbaticals (26% at schools where scholarship is not required); 34% had tenure or were on a tenure track (which we are not eligible for); and 33% were on presumptively renewable contracts (i.e., cannot be dismissed except for good cause, including at the point of renewal).
While HLS clinicians are earning below the median for a clinician nationally, AAUP survey data shows that the average Harvard professor (across all levels) receives a salary 170% of the national average.
In our survey of HLS clinicians, nearly 70% of respondents ranked pay as their top concern.
A number of respondents raised the fact that our pay is not reasonable given the cost of living of the Boston area and the cost of law school debt. Multiple clinicians explained that they were only able to work at Harvard because their partners had high paying jobs, they had family support in the area, or were otherwise externally supported.
Along these same lines, multiple respondents noted that their clinics were unable to recruit or retain skilled instructors because of low pay.
Lack of outside economic support should not be a bar to working at HLS.
On June 3, 2025, we put forward our salaries proposal; the Administration responded in October 2025 with a pay proposal of its own and described this proposal, along with a limited pool for professional development funds, as a "complete response" to our 20+ economic proposals.
Subsequently, we worked hard at the table to highlight the inadequacies of HLS’s current approach to clinicians’ salaries through careful and detailed analysis. We also endeavored to collaborate with the Administration to establish fair criteria in which we could ground our counterproposal, and took on board the Administration’s interest in an easily administrable salary structure. In February 2026, we presented a new salaries proposal.
Our proposal is anchored in federal pay practices, particularly the Judiciary Salary Plan, which covers law clerks and has also been used to anchor clinician pay in other law schools, Berkeley Law School in particular (see, e.g., this job posting for Berkeley's equivalent of a clinical instructor).
We estimate that our salaries proposal would add less than 1% to the overall HLS budget. HLS has not contested this estimate.
These are the salaries we proposed:
Clinical Instructor who has completed, in the role:
Less than three years of service: $135,000
Three years of service: $145,000
Senior Clinical Instructor who has completed, in the role:
Less than three years of service: $152,000
Three years of service: $155,750
Six years of service: $159,500
Ten or more years of service: $164,500
Clinical Fellow who has completed, in the role:
Less than one year of service: $86,500
One year of service: $91,500
Two years of service: $96,500
Senior Clinical Fellow: $103,500
Social Worker / Staff Attorney who has completed, in the role:
Less than three years of service: $125,000
Three years of service: $130,000
Senior Social Worker / Senior Staff Attorney who has completed, in the role:
Less than three years of service: $135,000
Three years of service: $138,750
Six years of service: $142,500
Ten or more years of service: $147,000
We recognize that our proposals would entail substantial additional spending and that Harvard faces financial uncertainty, but we would be selling our members short if we did not put on the table what we know our unit merits, based on fair comparators.
The Administration responded in April 2026 (before it had costed out our February 2026 proposal). They proposed the following salaries, with no steps for years of service. They proposed limited pay increases between years (never exceeding 2.75%), a contract “ratification bonus” of $500, and $2K for lecturers on law (an additional title around 20 members of the unit hold each year).
Tier 1, Clinical Fellow $75,000
Tier 2, Senior Clinical Fellow $80,000
Tier 3, Clinical Instructors $110,000
Tier 4, Sr. Clinical Instructors $127,000
Tier 1, Staff Attorneys $100,000
Tier 2, Senior Staff Attorneys $105,000
Tier 1, Clinical Social Worker I $85,000
Tier 2, Clinical Social Worker II $95,000
We have a public bargaining tracker that includes copies of all article proposals and counter-proposals from both sides, as well as summaries of what we seek to achieve with each article. Our priorities include:
Improving conditions for Clinical Fellows
Fellows are quickly trusted with the same responsibilities as clinical instructors and conduct similar teaching and substantive work as clinical instructors throughout their fellowships. However, for reasons no one in the Administration has been able to explain, they are in a Harvard job classification ("postdoctoral employee") that, among other things, renders them ineligible for retirement contributions and produces very ambiguous arrangements around paid time off (no clear allotment of paid time off; no formal way to request it; keep your own records based on what your manager says).
The Administration has rejected the notion that fellows should receive the same benefits as other unit members. We do not agree and have yet to hear a clear rationale for this exclusion.
The pathway from clinical fellow to clinical instructor is not clear. Fellows not only have lower pay and less job security, but there is also less transparency about promotion and retention. We are seeking to change that.
Job Security
In a welcome move, in November 2024, the Administration proposed an article giving unit members protection from discipline or dismissal except when there is just cause (a well understood legal concept).
We're seeking layoff protections - that layoffs can only take place in situations of financial exigency or when a Clinic or student practice organization is discontinued for bona fide educational reasons - and severance pay in the event of layoffs.
We also intend to embed existing HLS policies on appointment renewal and ensure that just cause protections apply at the point of appointment renewal.
Under existing policies, in general, senior clinical instructors have five-year "presumptively renewable" appointments. We believe this policy is in place because the American Bar Association's (ABA) accreditation standards for law schools require, at a minimum, presumptively renewable appointments for all full-time faculty teaching in law schools.
While HLS does not internally classify senior clinical instructors as full-time faculty, it's hard to understand how HLS could be compliant with the standard (which requires law school clinical programs to be "predominantly staffed by full-time faculty members" with only "a limited number of fixed, short-term appointments") unless it does so externally, for the purposes of ABA accreditation.
Employers must provide unions with information relevant to bargaining, so we asked whether anyone in the unit was being classified as full-time faculty for the purposes of ABA accreditation, to help us understand how HLS was understanding "presumptively renewable." We remain in a dispute over whether this information is relevant to bargaining, as the Administration feels - in the strongest terms - that it is not.
Inclusion in the HLS Academic Community
Many clinicians are undertaking the same, or substantially similar, work as our clinical professor colleagues.
Harvard Law School built the largest clinical program in the United States, a fact we regularly see touted in advertising. However, it created and grew its clinical program while keeping the number of clinical professors comparatively low. This aberrational choice - to have a small number of clinical professors and a large number of clinical instructors and fellows - is at odds with recognized best practice in legal education.
While we know that HLS's clinical model is not going to change, we have proposed a range of measures that recognize this similarity in jobs and encourage collaboration with both clinical and doctrinal faculty members, many of whom teach in areas that we both practice in and teach at HLS.
These measures include being allowed to enter the faculty lounge four times a semester (a space reserved for faculty members with free meals), owning our own intellectual property, and having access to funds for research assistance and attending academic and professional conferences.
Academic Freedom
Clinicians need academic freedom to be able to do our jobs. Clinicians represent the interests of marginalized communities and that work inevitably entails risk, particularly in this political environment. The ABA requires all accredited law schools to publish and adhere to policies on academic freedom and freedom of expression that protect full-time teachers (we do not know exactly which policies HLS relies on to meet this requirement). In light of this obligation, we struggle to understand why HLS appears unwilling to accept academic freedom protections in our contract.
The response from the Administration so far essentially boils down to: trust us, don't worry, you don't need contractual protections for academic freedom and freedom of expression. That's not an adequate response, from our perspective.
At the outset of negotiations, the lead negotiator for the University - the head of the Harvard Office for Labor and Employee Relations - expressed that in his experience over many years of negotiating union contracts at Harvard, first contract negotiations typically take about 18 months. We expressed strongly a desire to proceed faster and have taken as many steps as we can on our end to increase the pace of bargaining.
We started bargaining in September 2024. As of May 2026, we are 20 months into negotiations. We continue to seek additional bargaining sessions and subcommittee meetings in an attempt to move negotiations forward as efficiently as possible.
The definition of our unit that was certified by the National Labor Relations Board in April 2024 is:
INCLUDED: All full-time and regular part-time employees in the Harvard Law School clinical programs who provide clinical legal education to law students and/or legal services to clients or communities.
This includes: clinical fellow, senior clinical fellow, clinical instructor, senior clinical instructor, staff attorney, senior staff attorney, social worker, and non-supervisory Managing Attorney, Assistant Director, Associate Director, Director, and others with similar work responsibilities, in the HLS clinical programs (comprising in-house clinics, and student practice organizations).
EXCLUDED: Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Clinical Professor of Law, Visiting Clinical Professor of Law, Assistant Professor of Law, Professor of Law, Professor of Practice, Visiting Professor of Law, lecturers with only academic appointments (i.e., those in charge of externship clinics), undergraduate students, all employees covered by another union’s bargaining unit definition, managers and guards, nonprofessional employees and supervisors as defined in the Act.
HLS argues that a group of around 19 people in our unit are legally considered “supervisors” under section 2(11) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA); legally speaking, if someone is a supervisor under the NLRA, then the NLRB cannot require an employer to recognize that person as part of a union. In our view, none of the people in the HLS unit meet the statutory definition as interpreted through case law.
Regardless, employers retain the discretion to recognize the unit as including people who fit the statutory definition. From our perspective, it makes no sense from an administrative or practical standpoint for HLS to exclude the people in this category from the union - requiring duplicate systems, policies, and processes - and the only rationale we have heard from the Administration is as they are not legally required to include "supervisors" they will not allow them to be included.
The campaign for a union of academic workers at Harvard - Harvard Academic Workers (HAW) - started about seven years ago, and while there have been some efforts to plug into the campaign, it was only in 2023 that HLS clinicians became seriously involved. The HAW campaign launched publicly in February 2023 with the goal of one unit (i.e. one contract) for all non-tenure track researchers and teachers across Harvard.
In December 2023, rather than continuing to aim for one unit, HAW moved to a school-specific approach. The HLS clinicians who were involved in those discussions strongly supported this shift in approach and successfully argued that the HLS clinical community should form its own unit. By early February 2024, a clear majority of clinicians had signed union authorization cards, indicating to the organizing team that we could start talking to Harvard about the possibility of a stipulated election agreement to move toward a union election. On March 4, we filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
That election took place April 3, 2024. Virtually every clinician who was physically in Massachusetts that day turned out to vote. Seventy eight of the 96 members of our unit - a remarkable turnout of 81%, in spite of heavy rain and a requirement for in-person voting on one day only. The result was 62 votes in favor, 3 against; an additional 13 votes were "on challenge" (as the university contends those people are "supervisors," a category excluded from NLRB-certified units) so remained sealed as they would not have been outcome determinative.
We elected a five-person bargaining committee in May 2024 and offered the Administration bargaining dates starting in early July. In August, the Administration formed its bargaining team, which is made up of a mix of HLS and central university representatives, and the first date they could offer for negotiations was in mid-September 2024. We have been in negotiations ever since, endeavoring to meet every other week for 3+ hours each session.
The HLS Clinicians unit is not currently on strike.
We would make the decision of whether and when to strike as a unit. Under the UAW constitution, two-thirds of those participating in a strike authorization vote must vote “yes” in order to authorize a strike.
(The Harvard Graduate Student Union is currently on strike. Our sister unit under Harvard Academic Workers has a strike authorization vote open.)
If you are willing to help organize visibility actions, please e-mail HLSClinicians@gmail.com.
Notably, unions that include lawyers have successfully found ways to fulfill their obligations to clients during strike action. If we strike, we can seek advice from attorney peers in unionized workplaces on how to minimize impact on our clients. Ultimately, even if a strike is authorized, it is an individual worker’s own decision whether or not to participate.
The HLS Clinicians unit is part of the Harvard Academic Workers (HAW) union, alongside another unit of non-tenure track teachers and researchers from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (which includes the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Divinity School. The other unit's contract negotiations are completely separate from ours, though we keep each other updated on our progress.
Once we have ratified contracts, we will be organized together as one UAW “local” union with common concerns and interests. As a local union, we will establish bylaws, hold regular meetings, and set up standing committees to move forward the local union’s goals. We will work with our colleagues in other Harvard schools on local union matters and work together as an HLS Clinicians unit to ensure that our interests and needs are heard at the local union level.