The Negotiations: Miserly Harvard

EVERY WEEK now, a team of high-paid bargainers and Ropes and Gray lawyers go down to Government Center to try to ensure that Harvard pays 36 of its workers less than they would be making if they worked in Boston. The University must consider it a noble cause, keeping these people's wages down; it has spent a great deal of money during the last three months adapting itself to the inconveniences the strike of University Printing Office printers and Typing and Copy Center typesetters has brought on.

The 31 printers went out on strike in April, the five typesetters in May, and from the beginning the Graphic Arts International Union, representing the striking workers, and John B. Butler, Harvard's director of personnel, have agreed that their differences were almost completely over wages. The typesetters make about 25 per cent less than local union printers--it adds up to a seemingly indefensible case of underpayment by the University. But Butler says Harvard has to "stop inflation" by refusing to give the printers and typesetters the wages they want, and that because of its fringe benefits and character, "the University does not feel it must pay its employees the same pay as other employees bargain for elsewhere." So Harvard, by perverse logic, continues to do what it calls fighting inflation by cutting its own costs and making its employees bear the brunt of the economic squeeze. Although it is one of the largest corporations in America and intimately tied to the centers of corporate and governmental power, the University also keeps on insisting that it is somehow separate from the economic reality of paying its workers what they deserve.

During the first two months of the strike, the printers and the union didn't negotiate together much, and the strike's issues seemed to be public rather than private ones. It was Harvard's first employee strike since 1967, and it carried a considerable amount of interest and support. Students held rallies in support of the printers almost weekly, radical economists analyzed their economic status and the printers themselves picketed every day--all this while the University wasn't saying much about the strike and quietly finding ways to get its printing work done, probably at non-union shops. The two sides bargained in June in their second session since the strike began, in hopes of repeating 1967's pre-Commencement settlement, but they got nowhere. Students demonstrated in support of the printers on Commencement day and then, by and large, went home for the summer.

By mid-June, Harvard wanted to negotiate a two-year contract with the printers, with the University's standard 5.5 per cent wage increase in the first year of the contract and a slightly higher increase in the second year. The printers wanted a one-year pact, with 10 to 14 per cent annual raises, but the union soon started to make a series of major concessions in bargaining sessions. First the GAIU accepted the idea of a two-year agreement and resigned itself to a 5.5 per cent increase in the first year, but asked for a 21.5 per cent increase in the second year. But in future sessions, the union cut its second-year demands to 15 per cent and then, after Harvard flatly rejected that, went down to 12.5 per cent. The printers had voted before the most recent proposal that 15 per cent would be their absolute minimum pay raise for the second year, and when the union leadership offered 12.5 in a bargaining session many of the printers were amazed and shocked that Harvard had refused even to consider 15 per cent.

AMIDST ALL these concessions, Harvard has barely budged: it is now offering the printers an 8.5 per cent second year raise, having raised its offer 1.5 per cent while the printers were lowering theirs 9 per cent and giving in on the length of the contract and the terms of the first year. The University is apparently especially concerned about making as few concessions as possible because it is afraid that if it gives the printers what they deserve it will have to do the same for other Harvard workers.

The University and the printers' union start their sixth bargaining session today. Harvard's bargainers, men like Butler and William N. Mullins, manager of employee relations, must be extraordinarily cold-blooded to be able to continue squeezing concessions out of the union to keep them below Boston wages and barely in line with the cost of living. Today, though, they should think carefully about what they are doing to their workers and should realize that employee relations at Harvard, supposedly the most intelligent and humane of all institutions, means more than just getting the greatest possible amount of labor for the smallest possible amount of money. They should give the printers their 12.5 per cent--but even that is robbery. It is too late in the strike for anyone to emerge as victor; it is simply time for the University to stop its relentless price-squeezing.