Janitors Union Wins Wage Hike

Harvard and its janitors union reached a contract settlement late last night that would pay all janitors at least $11.35 an hour and raise wages steadily over the next three years. Both sides claimed success as last night’s agreement brought six weeks of heated negotiations to a close.

The settlement gives janitors slightly more than the base wage suggested by the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies, which recommended this winter that Harvard’s lowest-paid workers earn at least $10.83 to $11.30 an hour.

Retroactive to May 2001, starting hourly wages would be $11.35, and janitors who have worked at Harvard for at least three years would earn $11.50 an hour, negotiators for both sides confirmed.

And according to the agreement, wages would increase over each of the next three years so that, by October 2005, all janitors would receive at least $13.50 an hour.

Harvard negotiators called the contract a “great agreement” that was “favorable to the workers and the University,” and union officials and janitors said the agreement was “a joyful moment” after weeks of little progress on wages.

“Everybody feels so good,” said Rocio Saenz, deputy trustee for Service Employees International Union Local 254 (SEIU), which represents Harvard janitors. “Harvard is taking a great step on workers’ rights.”

The agreement, which already has the blessing of the University’s central administration, will likely be ratified by the SEIU’s full membership tomorrow, union officials said.

In addition to the higher wage levels, Harvard agreed to a union proposal that offers health care without worker co-payments, using a fund paid for by Harvard and administered by the union. The agreement also includes a “parity” provision: the University will require contractors to pay outsourced workers wages and benefits that, in total, are comparable to what Harvard pays its own workers.

Yesterday’s agreement came on the heels of an escalation in protest tactics by SEIU and students in Harvard’s Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM). Nine students, workers and labor officials were arrested by police Tuesday afternoon during a protest after they blocked traffic on Mass. Ave. in front of the Holyoke Center, which is home to Harvard’s Office of Labor and Employee Relations.

Both sides agreed that Tuesday’s protests were a turning point in the contract talks, but each maintained that the opposite side had given in to pressure.

Lead Harvard negotiator David A. Jones said press accounts had downplayed the Tuesday arrests, and he maintained that, disappointed by press coverage, the union had decided to make compromises.

“If [the protest] had been viewed by the union as more successful, we probably wouldn’t have seen as much movement,” Jones said early yesterday evening. “People, including the media, are starting to take notice of how unreasonable the union’s [initial] requests were going to be.”

But PSLM members and workers said the arrests, which were televised that night by several local news outlets, had harmed Harvard’s public image and led to the progress today.

Janitor Frank Morley, one of those arrested Tuesday, said Harvard officials had been watching the protest and had seen that the union “meant business.”

SEIU organizer Jairo Dias said he was “100 percent sure” the arrests had prompted Harvard’s movement at the bargaining table, because “they could realize the next step would be worse.”

“It’s unfortunate that it still took public pressure to get Harvard to move in bargaining and that people had to be arrested to get Harvard to make a respectable offer,” said PSLM member Alexander B. Horowitz ’02. “If the rank and file ratify the contract on Friday, we certainly support that. And the janitors’ organizing efforts have really paid off.”

Yesterday’s session, the sixth since talks started in January, saw progress on wage and benefit issues throughout the day—unlike the most recent meetings, where both sides had made competing offers but negotiators had left frustrated.

Until yesterday Harvard’s highest official offer had been a base wage of $11 per hour, while the union had been asking for $13.40.

Harvard’s new offer of an $11.35 per hour base wage was proposed informally to union officials by e-mail last week but was only offered officially yesterday morning. Jones said Harvard had intended to offer the $11.35 figure at the end of the most recent bargaining session on Feb. 19, which came to a close when union negotiators left to attend a practice session in preparation for Tuesday’s protest.

The weekly negotiations have been held in a first-floor conference room at the Sheraton Commander Hotel on Garden Street. Usually beginning around 10 a.m., one side would issue an offer and then each would break for a few hours for an internal caucus and offer a counter-proposal, after which caucusing would renew.

Early in yesterday’s session, after Harvard submitted its first offer of the day and the two sides were caucusing, Saenz said she did not expect the negotiations to conclude that day. But she said consensus on health insurance and parity requirements was closer than ever before.

Also during yesterday’s session, hotel management warned negotiators that they would have to relocate next week, in part because union members had picketed in front of the hotel early that morning, according to Jones.

By 7:30 p.m., after hours of caucus meetings and counterproposals, the two sides had mostly agreed on the retroactive $11.35 figure and the wage rate increases over the three years of the new contract. The dispute had been narrowed down to one main issue: when the yearly increases would kick in. Harvard had proposed October of each year of the contract, while the union had asked for July, which would move up the wage increases by three months.

Jones said that when Harvard negotiators made their proposal, they also told the other side that if a contract agreement was not reached last night, Mass. Hall might not okay the same offer next week.

At about 8:30 p.m., union negotiators returned with a counterproposal on the dates, which Harvard considered for a tense hour during which some janitors said they began to lose hope that negotiations would conclude that night.

“I thought at some point we had a deal going, and it just went bad all of a sudden,” Morley, one of the janitors, said at 9:20 p.m.

But minutes later, Harvard came back to the table with a compromise that would ultimately be accepted—some of the yearly increases would start in July and some in October and the University would agree to raise 2005 wages for new hires to the level for workers with three years experience.

The proposal was made quickly and the janitors retired to caucus.

At 9:30 p.m., chants of a janitor rallying cry—“si se puede,” or “yes, we can,”—rose from the conference room. Harvard negotiators returned, and by 10:15 p.m., both sides began clapping.

And 15 minutes later, they walked out with an agreement.

The janitors contract is one of several that Harvard will be renegotiating this spring. Talks between the University and the dining workers union opened last week, and bargaining with the security guards union will begin in the next few weeks. Unlike the negotiations with SEIU, which encompassed the janitors’ entire contract, Jones said these talks will only consider wages and are likely to be less complicated.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.