Preparing for Unions

Leslie Sullivan and several other members of the Medical Area Employees Organizing Committee came to Cambridge last week to give a little advice. They went to the first public meeting of a group called the Harvard Employees Organizing Committee, which is trying to do in Cambridge what their counterparts in the Medical Area have been doing for the last year or so--work toward organizing a clerical workers' union.

The Cambridge group is newer than the Medical Area one; it started only last spring, when an aggressive, persuasive secretary in the Physics Department named Gertraude Schroder started to talk to other secretaries about organizing. Schroder has been in fairly constant touch with the Medical Area group since she started to think about unionization, receiving advice and help along the way--although the two groups do not plan to join forces at present because the Medical Area committee is so much farther along.

The Cambridge committee has Herculean tasks to accomplish. It has to get the support of at least half, and preferably more, of the 3000 or so University clerical workers in Cambridge, a group that is spread out among hundreds of offices and whose composition is constantly changing. Schroder estimates that a union-forming vote among the clerical workers is still two years away.

Committee members seem to look at unionization as not merely a step toward higher wages, but as a move that would be of as much spiritual as economic value. The 40-odd people at last week's meeting complained that they feel powerless in their dealings with the administration, and that a union would give them a voice in determining their own working conditions.

John B. Butler, director of personnel, says the University would not contest the Harvard Employees Organizing Committee's efforts to form a union if the committee represents all the University's clerical workers; Butler considers any sub-group of the clerical workers an inappropriate unit for unionization. So although the committee will have to labor mightily to start a successful union, it will not have to deal with University opposition, as the Medical Area group will if it makes a separate unionization bid.

Although the clerical workers committee will probably not get past the organizing stage for a while, Harvard's labor relations will hardly be placid this fall. Two of Harvard's union contracts expire in November and December, and negotiations on both will begin late this month. Butler says he expects settlements with the 600-member Harvard University Employees Representative Association and the 340-member Metropolitan Boston and Vicinity Craft Maintenance Council, but the University and the unions are still likely to sit down at the bargaining table with substantially different ideas about wages.

The University will probably offer an increase in wages to the two unions, but will still offer lower wages than union members elsewhere in the Boston area are accustomed to getting; that is standard procedure for Harvard. The question is whether the University's concessions over the summer to the striking University Printing Office printers will encourage unions to be bolder in their wage negotiations with Harvard.