A Long Way From a Decision

Since the beginning of the academic year, Harvard and District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America have been waiting for Robert Fuchs, the New England regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, to tell them whether clerical and technical employees in the medical area will be allowed to hold a union-forming election.

The Medical Area Employees Organizing Committee, an affiliate of District 65, petitioned the NLRB in February for permission to hold the election; Harvard insisted that the only appropriate bargaining unit for these workers would be University-wide, and after three long months of hearings the case went to Fuchs.

But last Friday, Fuchs passed the buck to the national board in Washington. Declaring that the case poses "precedential" questions, he informed Harvard and the union that a decision could not be made on the local level. Fuchs is responsible for interpreting precedents, not for setting them, and all policy decisions in labor relations have to be made in Washington.

Ordinarily the transcript of the hearings and the briefs would simply be shipped down to Washington, and both sides would have to wait a little longer for a ruling.

But things this time are not quite so simple. The problem is that, at the request of both Harvard and the union, Fuchs agreed to take the unusual step of considering a "fragmented" case. Hearings on phase one, whether the medical area is an appropriate bargaining unit, had been completed, but phase two, which was to be devoted to determining which classifications of employees would be eligible to join a union if one was established, hadn't even begun. Since phase two is an issue only if the NLRB favors the union on phase 1, Fuchs broke precedent and reviewed the case in incomplete form.

But getting the national board to break a procedural precedent is something else again, and District 65 and Harvard may find themselves locked into another few months of hearings in Boston before the NLRB takes the case.

Harvard officials had expressed confidence in recent weeks that the University would win the case on the local level, and union members and supporters viewed Fuchs's decision as something of a triumph. Leslie Sullivan, District 65's medical area organizer, spoke for the union on Monday, remarking that the "fact that an institution as powerful as Harvard didn't win the case in Boston is a victory for us."

Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, took a philosophic view, saying that whichever side had lost on the local level would have appealed to Washington anyway, "so the decision may save time in the long run."

It may, but if phase two hearings are necessary in Boston now, it probably won't, and a final resolution is still likely to be a long way off.