Labor Pains

THE NEAR STRIKE of the Buildings and Services Union at Radcliffe underlines the anachronistic inefficiency of the College residences. The strike was over as soon as it was threatened, because the residences would have been thrown into chaos without their service employees--no food, filthy johns, garbage piling up in the halls, and food deliveries rotting.

Not that Cliffies are helpless. But the designs and facilities of the Radcliffe dormitories demand specialized staffs of a kind that were plentiful and cheap forty years ago, and are neither today.

The episode has shown that Radcliffe can't really afford to pay its service employees a living wage as the cost of living spirals. This time the wage settlement amounted to an extra 38 dollars per girl. Even if this isn't tacked directly onto tuition, each girl will still lose, because the College must simply divert funds from something like libraries or scholarships. And with the cost of labor still rising, there will be more wage increases like this one. But wages are only one facet of Radcliffe's problem. There is also an imminent shortage of service workers.

Service workers today send their children to college (as one dishwasher in South House said, 'Why do you think I'm here?"). Well, people say, servants will come from somewhere. But the fact is that they won't, and rightly so, Immigration has been a limited source of domestic labor since the 1920's, and recent legislation has limited this source even further.

Faced with rising labor costs and a shrinking supply of workers, most employers, as they say in Ec 1, would substitute capital for labor. Why can't Radcliffe? Actually, the question should be, why won't Radcliffe, since there's no reason why it can't.

One hundred and forty-nine members of the Buildings and Services Union care for about 1035 on-campus girls. This amounts to one-and-a-half employees for every ten girls--a rather high ratio for people with very little income and young enough to need little service, especially when the cost of this luxury could soon rise above the ability of many to pay. The obvious answer is to let Cliffies take care of themselves.

The maids, for example, spend half their time every day cleaning the large, multi-unit bathrooms. If normal size bathrooms were shared by two or three girls, the users could care for it, just like in the real world. This arrangement would actually involve less work, since girls would naturally tend to be tidier if they had to clean up after themselves. In any case, it's not going to ruin anyone's academic standing to clean up a bathroom occasionally.

This is already planned for the fourth house. But brand-new Mabel Daniels has old-style bathrooms. And renovation plans for Eliot and Bertram include more bathrooms, but still not enough.

THE MOST antedeluvian of Radcliffe departments are the kitchens. The large staffs are costly and inefficient. In the South House kitchen several days ago, seven cooks seemed to have very little elbow room. And the waitresses have to waste time loading, unloading, pushing and doling out the carts of food.

Radcliffe plans better and larger kitchens for the fourth house and the renovated dorms. The plans are fairly sound--cooking for larger number saves labor, as does more modern equipment. But the College is not looking far enough ahead: it is only looking for better means within a given income, where a new scheme is needed.

Labor requirements could be greatly reduced by cutting down on the number of meals in the dining rooms. With enough small kitchen units in the dorms, girls could easily prepare their own breakfasts (many kitchenettes are planned for Currier House, expected to eliminate any meal service). As for lunches, many alternatives exist. Most girls are quite happy to cat in the yard, as Lehman's popularity testifies. Perhaps Harvard houses could be opened to Cliffies, with only a limited coffee-shop type of operation at Radcliffe. Or, the University of Pennsylvania manages with a two-meal, no-lunch contract (they serve lunch but it's not required).

Dinners are undeniably essential. But the projected larger kitchens and dining rooms unavoidably depend on service workers, and are not the best solution.

Radcliffe has half the answer in the Jordans, where the girls cook for themselves, in groups of about 25 and at a saving of about $300 per girl per year. The kitchens are pleasant and modern, and the food is better than in the other dorms. When you spend less on labor and cook for smaller numbers, you naturally get better food. For less community-oriented upperclassmen, some dorms could contain regular apartments where girls could cook for themselves in groups of three or four.

Radcliffe apparently doesn't understand that it has a labor problem on its hands that can only get worse. The near-strike of last week should show the College that it must eliminate its wasteful use of labor. One Harvard student pointed out that the girls won't be happy about having to cook for themselves. But even cooking beats not being able to afford Radcliffe.