Food Workers to Bargain Aggressively

Harvard Food Services employees said yesterday they will adopt a more militant approach in upcoming contract negotiations to help secure higher wages and better job benefits.

"We were told by our last president to keep our mouths shut" during negotiations. James Burke, chief shop steward of Local 26 and a member of the 1980 negotiating committee said of the last negotiating process.

"The rank and file were told to accept an unacceptable contract," Burke said.

This time the union's negotiating committee will keep in close contact with its tank and file. Union President Dominic Bozzoto said yesterday. "It's simply an old trade unionist secret," he said designed to reorganize the spirit and dedication of the workers", when contracts are being reconsidered.

Within the next month. Harvard's approximately 500 dining hall workers will elect about 120 of themselves to a contract committee. Out of that committee, between 20 and 30 workers will be selected for a negotiating committee to deal directly with the University.

The vow to work more closely with the rank and file was inspired in part by an employee meeting last Tuesday at which Phillip Voight. Yale University's chief steward, out lined the negotiating strategy that he said helped Yale food service workers win numerous wage and benefit concessions in 1982.

Voight drew direct comparisons between the Yale contract and Harvard's, which he said has substantially lower wages and interior benefits.

Edward W. Powers, associate general counsel for employee relations, said yesterday that "any comparison with the Yale contract is completely irrelevant."

Who Gets the Money?

Powers said that Harvard's dining hall workers are the best paid in the greater Boston area and that average wages for dining hall workers in Boston are lower than those in New Haven. The Harvard wages are "simply a market phenomenon," he said.

The current wage and benefit scale saves Harvard $2 million a year, he said, adding. We're in the education business, not the food service business."

Voight cited a series of ways in which Yale's benefits are greater than Harvard's, including the fact that Yale's hourly base pay for dining hall workers is $1.50 to $2.00 higher. Yale also pays extra for weekend work, and offers accumulated vacation pay, he added.

Marie Kenney, Local 26's business agent and a former waitress at the Faculty Club, said that in addition to strategic reasons, there were moral grounds for keeping the rank and file informed of the progress of the contract negotiation.

Workers' Lives

"The union administration and the University simply should not discuss the lives of the workers without the workers having a voice in it," she said.

But Powers said the new negotiating plan is "not a threat" to the current system, because "our food service employees know that they have a good plan."