HMS Workers Weigh Retirement Options

Administrative employees at the Harvard Medical School (HMS) are in for a stressful two weeks, as the April 30 deadline for deciding whether or not to take an early retirement approaches.

In an effort to avoid an impending deficit, HMS has offered senior employees who meet certain criteria an attractive severance package as the first of a series of measures to cut costs.

But workers and union representatives acknowledge that the program will not benefit everyone.

“For people whose goal is to continue working at Harvard for a long time, this is probably not an attractive option,” said Bill Jaeger, Director of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). “There will be lots of people who won’t take it. I think where it’s attractive is for somebody who was planning to leave anyway.”

Those positions that are vacated as a result of the severance program will be scrutinized by several “work review” groups to decide whether to eliminate the position or refill it. According to an informational packet sent to eligible employees in late February, the HMS administration will make every effort to avoid hiring new employees for the vacated positions. Meanwhile, supervisors are not permitted to recommend that staff members accept or deny the package, because employees who deny the package now and are laid off at a later date would not be eligible for its benefits.

The expansion of science research facilities at HMS has left the school with a number of new expenses, and the push to cut positions is part of an initiative to overcome a projected deficit, according to Executive Dean for Administration Eric Buehren.

Jaeger said he sees the move as a shift in resources from administration to research.

“We’re respectful of the way the Medical School is doing this, as they’ve consulted with us significantly about how to reduce spending in staffing in some areas so they can grow in other areas,” he said.

Some current employees see the move as coercive, however.

“If you do not take it, you and everyone else at the Medical School can be involuntarily laid off after the fact,” said Anne Frankel, a Library Assistant at Countway Medical Library who has been working at HMS for 13 years. “They’re trying to get rid of the people who are costing them more, giving them an incentive to leave and making it inviting.”

According to Jaeger, however, the program represents “a good faith effort to keep the fear and disruption of layoffs to a minimum.

“Involuntary layoffs are disruptive,” he said. “Instead of work getting done, we have a lot of fearful water cooler time. If this program works for the Medical School, it’ll be because they didn’t terrify the work force with talks of layoffs.”

WORKERS WORRY

The administration has not set a specific goal for how many jobs the severance program should vacate, and if the work review groups do not cut enough jobs, involuntary layoffs—without the lucrative terms of the severance package—may be necessary anyway.

“We didn’t structure this program with a budget number in mind,” Buerhens explained. “But we know we aren’t going to have enough people leave through this program to solve the school’s financial problems. It’s going to require a whole range of actions.”

The fact that no goal has been stated has worried current staff, who are now weighing the risks of potential layoffs against continued employment at the school.

Jaeger said he would be concerned if fear of layoffs pressured workers to participate in the severance package, but said he has not noticed this among the union members.

Yet not all HMS staff members have taken the proposal in stride.

Richard M. Pendleton, a unionized employee at Countway, said he has observed a “general kind of uptightness and a sense of nervousness” from his colleagues.

Buehrens said he was sympathetic to the employees’ concerns, but said he thought that the severance package was the most “reasonable and humane and respectful” way to administer some necessary budget cuts.

Buehrens cited a slow year at the National Institute of Health—which funds many HMS grants—and its reluctance to pay for new labs and new faculty as reasons for the severance program’s launch.

But people whose salaries are paid for by grants and “soft money” contributions are not eligible for the program, according to the informational packet sent to employees.

The packet also stipulated that in order to be eligible, one must complete seven years of HMS service by December 31, 2004. The longer one’s tenure at the school, the more lucrative the severance package will be—the most senior employees could continue to receive their regular salaries for over two years.

Despite the fact that these provisions leave only 213 eligible employees, Buerhens remains optimistic that the measure will help close the budget gap before it becomes a problem.

“We don’t expect that those [deficit] projections will come true because we’re going to solve the problem,” he said. “We’re not going to run a deficit, when all is said and done.”

Frankel said that financial woes should be secondary to the school’s productivity, which she said will suffer with the departure of senior employees.

“What they’re doing by offering a package like this is inviting people to leave who have institutional knowledge, and that bothers me,” she said. “People who care about the place will leave.”

According to Frankel, the Medical School has given departments permission to hire temporary workers, but Beuhrens said that they will be used sparingly if the work review groups operate efficiently.

“We’re making every effort to structure the review process so that it can function as quickly as possible, so that we can target priority areas,” he said. “There are certain activities that we can’t allow to lapse for any amount of time.”

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.