Boston University grad student who isn't striking sues school for failing to pay her on time for her work

A Boston University graduate student today filed what she hopes will be a class action against the school for what she charges is the haphazard system it now has for paying her and other graduate students for the work they do for professors.

In her suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Mary Rachel Nalehua, a bioinformatics PhD student, says she and other BU graduate students get wages - what the school calls a "service stipend" - of between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, and formerly paid weekly, for such work as doing research for their advisors, lab work for professors and working with undergraduates as teaching advisors.

Nalehua said the system worked fine until a group of graduate students declared a strike on March 25, and BU enacted a new payment system that required weekly written "attestations" of work performed:

Due to the hasty and haphazard manner in which BU "rolled out" that policy, however, numerous graudate student workers have consistently failed to receive all their earned wages in a timely manner - instead being paid weeks and, in some instances, months late - as required by the state Wage Act.

Like most other graduate student workers at BU, Nalehua has not participated in the strike. But as with many other graduate student workers in similar circumstances, BU has failed to timely pay Nalehua the wages she is owned for the work she has performed since the strike commenced in March, 2024. The same is true for numerous other graduate students who have continued to perform conpensable work throughout the strike bout who have not received their wages, timely and in full, in violation of the Wage Act's requirements.

She continued that she only received her May and June wages on July 9 - after she and other grad students filed numerous queries asking where their money was.

Nalehua is seeking to be made lead plaintiff in a class action, a court order certifying BU has broken the law, payment of treble damages for delayed wages, interest and attorneys' fees.