Organizers Borrow From Old Eli

They won't adorn their bodies with flowing magenta robes today. Nor will they file past University Hall lugging signposts that bear class years. But the 12 Harvard clerical workers who call themselves the "Pipets" will be singing at one of the entrances to Harvard Yard.

Kristine A. Rondeau, a United Auto Workers (UAW) organizer, says the singing group's name--which refers to glass tubes used in science laboritories--derives from a drive more than four years ago to organize Harvard medical area clerical and technical workers into a labor union.

In that National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election, the workers voted 390-328 against unionization. UAW filed charges with NLRB charging Harvard with union-busting activities after administrators announced a 12 percent wage increase and sent literature to employees' homes urging them to vote against the union.

Four years later, UAW is back. The eight full-time-officials and other clerical and technical workers organizing throughout the University say they expect another NLRB election next year. This time, however, all 3,600 employees--about 80 percent are women--will vote. UAW says a University-wide union satisfies Harvard's claim during previous elections in 1977 and 1981 that medical area employees did not constitute a separate bargaining unit.

The 32-year-old Rondeau says UAW has not yet spoken to 25 percent of the affected workforce, but before the election she promises that UAW will "build every bridge and relationship to keep [themselves] from being bought off by the University." Rondeau and UAW officials have held lunchtime talks throughout the year for workers on issues ranging from comparable worth to the rise of computers in the workplace. Later this month they will stage a musical comedy in Memorial Hall entitled "Cambridge, Cambridge" and will publish an art journal beginning this summer. This fall, the union organizer says Harvard students and workers will speak to student groups about their union drive.

Workers interviewed say the four-month-long Yale University strike last year will help Harvard's drive. In New Haven, 2,600 clerical and technical workers walked out of their jobs at the end of September after wage, benefit and job security negotiations broke down. Food service and maintenance workers of AFL-CIO Local 35 later joined the strike, which soon attracted national attention. Yale University dining halls and libraries closed, students picketed with workers, and faculty members moved classes off campus so as not to break picket lines. The university and the union representing Yale's clerical and technical workers, AFL-CIO Local 34, ended the strike at the end of January with a contract that hiked wages 35 percent over a three-and-a-half-year period and included a dental plan.

The Yale strike "was a great thing for us because there was never anything that hit so close to home," says Bill Jaeger, a staff assistant at the Russian Research Center.

But Harvard University officials point to that strike as an example of the way a clerical and technical union can disrupt the serene atmosphere necessary for an academic community.

Citing the Yale strike, Daniel Steiner '54, University vice president and general counsel says he and other too administrators oppose a clerical and technical union at Harvard because "there has been a history of devisiveness caused by unions at universities." Also, since clerical workers are closer to research activities than other workers, that kind of union could disrupt academics much easier, says Steiner. "Compensations, benefits and working conditions are good at Harvard," says the vice president.

Steiner says a Harvard secretary makes, on average, between $16,000 to 16,500 per year, while UAW organizers hedge, saying that figure is closer to $15,000--which is about $1,500 more than a Yale secretary made before the strike. The job turnover rate is also under dispute. Steiner says 23 percent of clerical and technical jobs change hands annually. UAW says that rate is over 50 percent.

Harvard has started recruiting clerical workers with advertisements on MBTA subways, a move Steiner calls the product of a tight Boston labor market and not a high turnover rate. In conjunction with an independent opinion research company, the University in April sent a 27-page survey to clerical and technical workers querying attitudes on issues like wages, sexual harrassment and Massachusetts Hall administrators. Harvard officials say the poll was an effort to improve working conditions, but union organizers quickly called it a tool to test the degree of their activity among workers. A chief UAW beef is the absence of a dental plan, a benefit that Steiner has said is on its way in the near future.

Fifteen Years to Ratification

Yale clerical and technical workers began organizing in 1968, but it was not for another 15 years and three NLRB elections later that AFL-CIO Local 34 gained official ratification. To get NLRB approval, a union must receive a majority vote from its worker constituency in a sanctioned election. The NLRB, which was formed during Franklin D. Roosevelt's '04 New Deal era, requires a petition with 30 percent of the worker's signatures before it will sponsor an election.

Columbia University clerical workers finally gained NLRB-recognition in February. The 1,000 employees had voted in favor of UAW District 65 two years beforehand, but Columbia, questioning the election's legitimacy, appealed the election to the NLRB. Legal skirmishes persisted for more than a year, but the controversy came to head when the union threatened to strike unless the university recognized it.

Harvard Professor of Economics Richard B. Freeman, a noted specialist in labor economics, cites the upturn in the American economy since the 1981-82 recession as a possible explanation for recent university labor gains. However, John W. Wilhelm, the chief union negotiator during the Yale strike, says recent worker activity is "just the tip of the iceberg." Union organizing by clerical workers, who are predominantly women, has its roots in the women's liberation movement beginning in the 1960s, says Wilhelm.

"Harvard has to learn to sit down with women workers as equals. The days of paternalism are over," says Rondeau.

Wilhelm says the advent of clerical, service, and government employee unions is a result of a recent production shift from the manufacturing to the service sector. "The traditional backbone of union membership has shifted," he says. "There's substantially less jobs in manufacturing today than there was 25 years ago."

Despite protestations to the contrary, union organizers around the Ivy League insist that the universities don't practice what they preach.

"The Ivy League universities are contradictory places. Although they stand for liberty and enlightenment, they are actually very undemocratic places," says Wilhelm.