Overtime Eligibility Extended to 700 Harvard Employees

After this month’s completion of a year-long review of low-level professional jobs, the University has changed the status of approximately 700 Harvard employees so that they are now eligible to earn overtime pay. As part of these changes many of these employees are also now eligible to become union members.

Human resource offices in the University’s various schools began contacting affected employees last week.

The change comes as a result of the University’s efforts to ensure its compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a New Deal era federal law that regulates many aspects of employment practices.

Specifically, Harvard reviewed its compliance with the portions of the law concerning overtime benefits.

While the law mandates that most employees be paid overtime when they work more than 40 hours per week, it exempts employers from making such payments to individuals in jobs that handle certain administrative or decision-making tasks.

Through its study, Harvard determined that some of these employees previously considered “exempt” did not perform duties consistent with this classification. As a result Harvard will now consider these employees as “non-exempt” and thus eligible for overtime payments.

This non-exempt status means that many of the reclassified employees will become eligible to join the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). However, none of the employees will be forced to join.

“This is a very positive move,” said HUCTW Director Bill Jaeger. “There are lots of good feelings in our organization [about the reclassification effort].”

Jaeger said that he believed HUCTW membership would see a significant jump from the reclassification. He said that the union had previously informally expressed some concern to the University about the improper classification of employees. He said he was glad to see such a thorough effort to make sure employees were classified correctly.

Many of the jobs that were reclassified were in the information technology field.

Affected employees will not see changes in title or base salary. The University has also agreed to continue offering to the reclassified employees all benefits ordinarily given only to exempt employees. However, employees hired for these positions in future years will not be given such benefits.

The changes in classification are retroactive to July 1, 1999, so employees who are now subject to overtime payments will be able to request compensation for any documented overtime worked since that date.

Mary C. “Polly” Price, Harvard’s associate vice president for human resources, said that the University is uncertain of the added cost that reclassification will cause in future years. She noted that supervisors will be less likely to have these employees work overtime now that such work must be compensated.

While the changes will only increase employee compensation, some have expressed concerns about the potential effects of being reclassified into the non-exempt status.

“I think it was a broad concern,” said Christianna H. Morgan, administrator of the women’s studies program. “Because the process moved slowly, apprehension built over time.”

She said that once the University made it clear that reclassified employees would not lose any benefits from the change, the concerns of employees were reduced.

Another individual noted that at Harvard the difference between the two classifications is seen as a status symbol, separate from its definition under FLSA, creating potential unhappiness with reclassification.

“In the workplace culture of Harvard, there is a tendency to equate the word ‘exempt’ with professionalism,” Jaeger said. “It is one of a few policies [at Harvard] which has tended to divide staff into two classes.”

Jaeger expressed the hope that this current reclassification will lead the University and its staff to reconsider the importance placed on the distinction.

In order to complete its review, the University hired an outside consulting firm that worked along with the Office of Human Resources and the General Counsel’s office. The human resource offices within each school also participated in the effort.

Hundreds of employees were contacted as part of the reclassification. Some had individual interviews with administrators or the consulting firm, while others were merely requested to complete written surveys.

Price said that this review was the broadest review of University employment in the 17 years she has worked at Harvard. She added that such a review was independent of the recent employment-related student activism on campus.

—Staff writer Daniel P. Mosteller can be reached at dmostell@fas.harvard.edu.