Butler Memorandum Predicts 10 Per Cent Employee Raises

A memorandum from John B. Butler, director of Personnel, to Harvard's faculty deans and budget directors predicts pay raises averaging from 9.5 to 10 per cent for clerical and technical employees next year.

Butler's memorandum says the raises are intended to keep Harvard's salaries competitive with those of other employers and to minimize "the impact of inflation on those lower paid employees most affected by increased coats."

Butler said yesterday that the figures in the memorandum are preliminary are intended mainly to help deans draw up their budgets for next year. The University will not announce its pay raises until May.

The memorandum lists allowable raises for ten different job categories and four performance ratings, ranging as high as $100 a month in one category.

Organizers for two groups trying to unionize the approximately 4000 clerical and technical workers here said yesterday the raises had come in direct response to their organizing efforts.

Gertraude L.Schroder, a secretary in the Physics Department and an organizer for the Harvard Employees Organizing Committee, said the raises are "the result of our unionizing push." She said the raises are the highest Harvard has ever given its clerical workers.

But Butler and Financial Vice President Hale Champion said the raises did not come in response to unionizing activity and are about the same as last year's.

Leslie Sullivan, an organizer for District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America, the union organizing clerical workers here, said she is preparing a written response to the raises to distribute to employees.

Sullivan and Schroder said they obtained copies of Butler's memorandum a month ago and have discussed it in organizing meetings.

Two unions that signed new contracts with the University this year got annual pay raises of 7.6 and 8.5 per cent, although officers of both unions said the pay benefits in their new contracts were high enough to make the increase in value of the contracts over 10 per cent.

Champion said the pay raises represent an approximate cost increase to the faculties of 7 to 8 per cent, but added that the raises are "not yet a settled issue" because of fluctuating inflation rates and job markets.