Still No Progress In the Strike

The contract negotiations are still apparently going nowhere in the fourth week of the Harvard printers strike, but this week seemed to be a fairly good one for the 31 striking bookbinders and lithographers.

The student members of the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life supported unanimously a statement supporting the strike after the full CHUL refused to take a stand, and the Harvard Union of Radical Political Economists issued a report supporting the strikers' wage demands.

But despite the growing support for the strike among Harvard students and instructors, the Personnel Office seems to be retrenching with some success.

Graphic Arts International Union officials said this week that only about 25 per cent of the delivery trucks coming in to the University Printing Office are honoring the picket lines, as opposed to about 50 per cent at the strike's outset. And the University is also trying to stop 11 workers in the University Mail Communications Center from joining one of the striking Unions of the GAIU.

The University will ask the National Labor Relations Board this month not to allow the mail workers to unionize on the grounds that they "would not be an appropriate unit" within the printers' union, John B. Butler, director of personnel, said this week.

Meanwhile, the six just-unionized University typesetters apparently have no immediate plans to join the striking members of their union, GAIU local 300.

Butler, the official University negotiator and spokesman on the strike, will not say now much the strike is costing Harvard, but union officials have estimated the figure at about $12,000 a week.

The strike also continues to hurt the printers, who are now getting about $60 a week from the union's strike fund.

The future of the strike is indefinite. Student support, which seems likely to grow, will undoubtedly continue to put some pressure on the University. If the mail workers unionize and strike--which could take more than a month if it happens at all--and the typesetters strike, it would help the lithographers' and bookbinders' cause. On the other hand, the union strike fund won't last forever, and the cost of the strike to Harvard--though considerable--will probably dwindle if this week's trend on deliveries continues. Proportionally, it appears at this point that the University has more to lose by giving in than the strikers do.