A Pay Raise With No Guarantees

HARVARD'S PROJECTED 9.5 to 10-per-cent pay raises for its 4000 clerical and technical employees is a needed and correct step toward bringing salaries here in line with salaries outside the University. The salary discrepancy has gotten to the point where it is starting to pressure Harvard as well as its employees: most clerical and technical workers are secretaries who can often find similar and better-paying employment elsewhere. The University's pay raises apparently come in response to what could turn into a general exodus among clerical and technical employees here.

The raises also come at a crucial stage in an ongoing drive to unionize the clerical and technical workers--shortly before the workers may be able to hold their first union-forming election. It is doubtful, however, that the workers will let the raises blind them to their need for a union. Despite the generous pay raises, the workers still have no voice whatever in determining the wage and working policies that govern their lives here, nothing to guarantee that next year's raises will be as good as this year's.

Without a union, clerical and technical workers will still have to live under policies that are objectionable and that they had no part in making. Their wages, for instance, are determined in part according to bosses' evaluations of the quality of their work--a method of determining pay that is reminiscent of the high-pressure productivity scales that unions have all but eliminated in industry. Without a union, clerical and technical workers will remain under the total domination of Harvard administrators who are not always as kind as they decided to be this year.