Let the Med Area Unionize

THE UNIVERSITY'S lengthy and concerted campaign against the unionization of workers in the Medical area marks another example of Harvard's disappointingly familiar insensitivity to the best interests of the University community. In a two-and-a-half year legal battle against the efforts of District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America to hold an election among Med Area workers. Harvard and its lawyers have consistently sought to prevent over 1000 University clerical and technical employees from gaining the right to bargain effectively with their monolithic employer. And now, even after the National Labor Relations Board has upheld the union's right to go ahead in its organizing drive, Harvard continues to oppose the workers' desire to deal through an effective bargaining representative.

Harvard's personnel relations department has been waging an all-out campaign to defeat the union in the upcoming election on June 29, and quite likely will not admit defeat even if, as seems likely, District 65 earns the right to represent the Med Area workers. University officials admit that they have not ruled out the possibility of challenging any possible union victory in federal court--thus ensuring perhaps another year or so of costly, senseless legal bickering that will benefit neither Harvard, its employees, nor the students.

THROUGHOUT THE LONG District 65 controversy, University officials have maintained that they have only been following their logical legal options. This is true--Harvard is too sophisticated an institution to engage in overt union-busting. Yet by opposing the obvious wishes of the Med Area workers for a union of their own, by wasting countless thousands of dollars on high-powered legal talent for the sole purpose of stymieing a legitimate voice for its employees, and by failing to recognize that such opposition only further erodes its already severely tarnished public image, the University has displayed a stubborn unwillingness to realize that it cannot always have its own way. Med Area workers will probably make this desire clear on June 29 by giving District 65 a clear mandate. Perhaps then the University will realize that all its money can only buy high-priced lawyers--it cannot buy the healthy relationship with its employees that it so obviously needs but so stubbornly resists.