End Administrative Interference in Union Drive

WHEN OVER 8000 University nonacademic employees opened their mailboxes last week, they found along with their conventional mail, a rather unconventional letter. It was from Edward W. Powers, then director of employee relations, and it cautioned them to "think carefully" before signing a union card under District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America. District 65, the letter said, has engaged in "scare tactics" in its unionizing drives both on the main campus and in the Med area, and has "tried to make Harvard look like a criminal" by "distorting or misrepresenting facts" in its newsletters to Harvard workers.

The Powers letter specifically criticized the union's alleged misrepresentation of the facts of the recent Sherman Holcombe and Paul Trudel cases, and its "misstatements" about Harvard's employee grievance procedure.

Leaders of worker groups both on the main campus and the Med area spent over a week formulating responses to the Powers blast. Those responses, which appear in the most recent set of employee newsletters, attack Powers for treating District 65 as a "disembodied" entity on campus, and ignoring the fact that the newsletters are written by Harvard workers, and not by outside union organizers.

"We have not intentionally lied or misrepresented the facts," the Medical area workers' newsletter states. "Even so, we make no pretense that we are infallible."

The tactics used by the union, however, are not the main issue here. Unions often tend to distort or color the truth in their organizing drives; in the case of the employees organizing under District 65, operating as they are without Harvard's superior resources, propagandizing often becomes a necessary, if non-ideal, fact of life.

The Powers letter fails to distinguish between the two fundamentally different District 65 organizing drives at Harvard; nor does the letter even tacitly acknowledge the fact that the workers themselves originally invited District 65 to the Harvard campus and are themselves fully in control of the unionizing drive. To say that "District 65" drafted the newsletters is to distort patently the actual situation.

While the unionizing drive on the main campus, organized under the Harvard Employees' Organizing Committee, is stili in its incipient stages, the drive to organize clerical and technical workers in the Medical area has been close to completion for nearly a year.

The Med area campaign has gone on too long; both it and the main campus organizing activity have been blocked by the Harvard administration at every conceivable turn. The HEOC and the Med Area District 65 newsletters attacked by Powers reflect the accumulated frustrations of two years of stalemated organizing activity. The Med area case has long languished in the halls of the National Labor Relations Board both in Boston and in Washington, and both sides are currently awaiting a ruling on a District 65 appeal request. If the Board holds true to form, the request will probably be denied.

The latest attempt on the part of the University to interfere with the District 65 drive, then, represents a further audacious infringement of the workers' right to determine their own mode of union representation, made all the worse because of the letter's insidious, superficially well-intentioned nature.

The recent proliferation of charges and counter-charges can only serve to further confuse workers who have sought union representation at Harvard for well over two years.

Perhaps District 65 is not the right union for Harvard workers, but certainly this is a matter for the workers themselves, and not the Harvard administration, to decide.

This week's administrative reshuffling of the personnel office underscores the fact that Powers, like the rest of the Harvard administration, has taken his cues on the District 65 case from Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, all along. It is particularly distressing that the initiative which produced the letter obviously came from Steiner, the same individual who has worked so hard in preparing Harvard's case against District 65 in the NLRB. That Steiner apparently played an instrumental role in prompting the anti-union letter makes the letter all the more regrettable; such a tactic, coming as it does at a particularly crucial time in the unionizing drive, can only serve to further alienate the workers from the University.

Workers should be well-informed concerning the choices available to them in unionzing, and they should not be assailed by senseless propaganda.

District 65 deserves, and must be granted, a fair hearing by the Harvard community; continued administrative interference is deplorable and must end.