Trades Council Ratifies A New Harvard Contract

The Maintenance Trades Council of New England last night ratified a new one-year contract for its 331 members who work in the Harvard Department of Buildings and Grounds.

The B&G workers will get an 8.5 per cent pay raise and additional pay of 25 cents an hour for evening shift work and 50 cents an hour for night shift.

The Harvard members of four of the trades council's five member trade unions approved the contract during vacation, and the fifth--a painters' union--ratified it in a vote last night.

The trades council's old contract with Harvard officially terminated yesterday, so that if the union had rejected the contract its members could have gone on strike immediately.

The new contract also includes an additional annual holiday, raising the number of holidays for union members to 11 and one-half days a year.

Neither John J. Mark, president of the Maintenance Trades Council, nor William N. Mullins, manager of employee relations and Harvard's chief negotiator on the new contract, would comment last night on the ratification.

The ratification comes after more than three months of negotiations and repeated statements by Mark last month that the trades council was likely to go on strike against the University.

The trades council is the second largest union at Harvard. The largest--the 600-member Harvard University Employees Representative Association--signed a new contract with Harvard last month.

The employees' representative association--which is an in-house union, rather than an AFL-CIO affiliated one like the trades council--got a 7.6 per cent pay hike and 15 cents an hour extra for evening and night shift work in its new one-year contract.

Although the trades council got larger increases, the extra late-shift pay will affect about 300 members of the employees representative association and only about 20 trades council members. Until this year, trades council members worked only on a single day shift