Harvard Campus : A Textbook Labor Union Campaign

The young woman hopped atop the piano as her accompanist struck up the tune of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend.” But when Joie Gelband began to sing, her song was “Unions Are A Woman’s Best Friend,” and the standing-room-only crowd lustily applauded as late-afternoon sunlight filtered in through the stained glass windows of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church.

The incongruous song and setting were but two of many that have come to characterize one of the past decade’s most important union struggles--the long campaign to organize 3,450 clerical and technical workers at Harvard University, America’s most prestigious institution of higher learning.

Today, that campaign will end, when workers vote on whether they want to be represented by the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, which is affiliated with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the nation’s largest unions.

Many Incongruities

It is a campaign replete with incongruities. Perhaps the most prominent is that Harvard’s president, Derek Bok, a former labor law professor who co-authored a widely used text sympathetic to trade unionism, is vigorously opposing the union here. Another is that Harvard, one of America’s wealthiest universities, may be outspent by the union, which has put upwards of half a million dollars into its organizing effort here.

Also unusual is the silence being kept by many of Harvard’s liberal, normally outspoken professors, such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith. On the other hand, many public figures, including Coretta Scott King, Democratic Rep. Joseph Kennedy, whose district surrounds the Harvard campus, and writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. have endorsed the campaign.

Unique Situation

Much about the Harvard situation is unique; there clearly is no other workplace like it and no work force as diverse as this one--accountants and animal feeders, data terminal operators and dental assistants, secretaries and scientific instrument makers--scattered through 400 buildings in the Boston area and a primate research center 60 miles away.

Nonetheless, according to labor relations experts, the outcome of today’s election could have a historic impact on American trade unionism.

“Now, at the end of the Reagan years, with labor on the defensive, what is pivotal by all accounts is labor’s ability to organize white-collar workers,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor and technology specialist at the University of California in San Diego, who started following the Harvard campaign when he taught at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Here, you have an extremely visible institution, which has put up deep resistance to a union over an extensive period of time. If the union wins, it will be a landmark,” Shaiken said. “The tactics the organizers have used and the way they have brought people together is reminiscent of the spirit of the ‘30s--the singing group, one-on-one organizing, mass meetings.”

Although the spirit of the 1930s may be present here, this battle has a very contemporary look. The principal adversaries are not the hulking, hard-handed, middle-aged men of vintage news reels. The union’s chief organizer at Harvard is a 5-foot, 4-inch, 110-pound Vermont-educated biologist, while the university’s anti-union campaign is being directed by a slightly larger, Ivy League-trained lawyer. Both are intelligent, articulate women.

The workers for whose hearts and minds they are contending also depart from the stereotype: Eighty-three percent are women, many of them with college degrees; their average yearly pay is $18,500 and they are highly mobile. Harvard says the annual turnover among its employees is 26%, while the union puts the figure at 40%.

Both the union leader, Kristine Rondeau, and the Harvard lawyer, Anne Taylor, predict victory, but both say it will be close.

Resisted at First

Rondeau, 36, has a biology degree from Windham College and went to work at the Harvard Medical School in 1976 as a research assistant in the department of physiology and biochemistry. Soon afterward, she was approached by a union organizer, but resisted him.

“I loved being in the lab. The idea of taking a position that Harvard wouldn’t like really disturbed me.” But after months of discussion with co-workers, Rondeau decided she wanted more of a voice on the job and that joining a union was the way to get it. Over the next five years, she played an active role in two organizing drives at the medical school, both of which failed in relatively close votes.

At the time, the Harvard organizing committee was affiliated with the white collar unit of the United Auto Workers. Disputes over style, tactics and the role of women led to a parting of the ways in 1985. For the next 18 months, a core group of organizers worked without pay to keep the drive alive. Signs of mounting support caught the eye of AFSCME leaders. In January, 1987, the Harvard union signed an affiliation agreement with AFSCME and the campaign accelerated.

At that point, university officials asked Taylor, a lawyer in the Harvard general counsel’s office who had worked for the National Labor Relations Board, to spearhead the anti-union campaign. Taylor accepted. “After 4 1/2 years at Harvard, I had come to the view that a union was not a good fit here,” Taylor said in an interview in her Harvard Square office.

“Harvard is an extremely progressive, responsive employer,” Taylor said. She argues that Harvard already pays competitive salaries, provides a good pension plan, pays considerable attention to employees’ individual needs and offers considerably more quality child care than other employers.

Employee Mailings

The university has mailed employees reams of printed material on these issues and others.

Last month, Bok also sent a 4-page letter to each employee. “As you may know, I spent many years teaching labor relations and collective bargaining at Harvard,” the university president wrote.

“I am not opposed to unions at Harvard (where we have seven different unions), and I have always believed that it is a good thing for America and for working people that employees have the opportunity to vote for a union if they decide that their wages and working conditions will improve as a result. However, I am not at all persuaded in this case that union representation and collective bargaining will improve the working environment at Harvard or help us to sustain the highest quality of education and research.”

Bok’s letter said that individual initiative and flexibility, which are “at the very heart of the academic enterprise,” may be inhibited by the presence of a union.

Rondeau challenged Bok’s assertion, saying that the real issue is how much control workers have on the job. “The reason to vote for the union,” she tells workers in one-on-one meetings, “is that you must participate in how policy is set in your workplace.” She also contends Harvard could afford to pay more and provide greater benefits, including more “affordable child care.”

Support for and opposition to the union cuts across the Harvard work force. Members of both camps can be found among the younger employees who see their jobs as way stations on the road to other positions and among the veteran workers who profess intense loyalty for Harvard.

“I handle all the donations of stocks and bonds given to the university,” said Susan Manning, 24, who came to work at Harvard after studying economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She said she is paid $15,600 a year as a staff assistant, just above the minimum for her classification.

Campaign Button

Like many union backers, she wears a button saying, “You Can’t Eat Prestige.” Referring to Harvard’s $3.85-billion endowment, she said: “When you see all the money coming through that I do, and you see how much Harvard under-pays their people and undervalues their employees, having a union is a cause you have to fight for.”

Bertha Ezell, 65, came to Harvard before Manning was born. She has worked here for 29 years and for the past decade has been the primary staff assistant in the East Asian Legal Studies program at Harvard Law School.

“I love my work,” said Ezell, who has a large office with her name on the door, a sheaf of outstanding performance evaluations and even a newspaper clipping describing how the program sent Ezell and her husband to China as a reward for her labors.

But at $25,000 a year, Ezell contends she is underpaid by at least $5,000. She said that she has been denied raises despite recommendations by her boss. “The personnel department told me I didn’t have the credentials,” said Ezell, who is a high school graduate. “People of my generation didn’t have the opportunity to go to college, but we’ve got a work ethic,” she said.

“I didn’t want to rock the boat,” she said, explaining that she initially opposed the union. But after many hours of conversation with organizers, “I decided it’s not anti-Harvard to be pro-union.”

Connie Hill couldn’t disagree more. She heads the Staff Support Action Committee, the employee group opposing the union.

‘Not Necessary’

“I think a union is not necessary here,” said Hill, 25, who works in the student billing office in the main university administration building. “I enjoy our supervisor and my co-workers. I think I’m well-paid.”

Hill, who has a degree in industrial relations and economics from McGill University, said she fears losing her four days a week “flex-time” schedule if the union wins. And she criticized the union for “harassing” workers on the job.

Other workers anxiously point out that when Yale’s clerical and technical workers joined a union in 1983, the result was a 10-week strike. The university has emphasized the bitter history of Yale’s experience with collective bargaining, while the Harvard union has praised the contract Yale’s workers ultimately won.

For her part, Rondeau refuses to apologize for the union’s intense, personal organizing style: “You have to talk to people to get them involved.”

In fact, all 16 of the union’s staff organizers here are current or former Harvard employees, something the union continually emphasizes in an attempt to deflect charges that it is an alien third force that will come between Harvard and the workers.

AFSCME’s national president Gerald McEntee was especially mindful of that issue, and the traditional skepticism of white collar workers about collective action, when he addressed the church rally a few days ago.

“It’s not McEntee’s union . . . it’s your union,” he declared. “For our union, one of the best honors we’ve had is to be associated with you. You are the best and the finest of what the new American labor movement should be all about and will be all about.”