Schism Grows in HUERA Over Mulvihill Reelection

University grounds keepers and truck drivers yesterday petitioned to break with their present union, the University Employees Representative Association.

This move has been pending for several months, but the maintenance men held off to see how last Tuesday's H.U.E.R.A. elections would go.

According to members, the men have been dissatisfied for some time with Daniel G. Mulvihill, re-elected president, because of what they term "secretive activities" concerning worker-management relations. Now that Mulvihill has been put back in office, they have decided there is "nothing to gain" by remaining in the union.

University engineers have also begun circulating similar petitions to disaffiliate.

Edward Chamberlain, janitor of Lowell House, said that, in the event of a break, the responsibility for paying Mulvihill and supporting H.U.E.R.A. would fall entirely on the maids and janitors, and there is already a movement among the janitors to petition for their own break.

Change Constitution

"If maintenance, the engineers, and the janitors stay in," said Chamberlain, "they will still be able to change the amendment under which Mulvihill holds office."

This amendment says that to run for president, a person cannot have severed his connections with the University more than two years ago. Mulvihill stopped working for the University one and one-half years ago. But the candidate, Robert W. Smith, who was supposed to oppose Mulvihill and whose name never appeared on the ballot, had been retired for two years and one month, and was thus refused a place on the ballot.

Another faction that has been angered by the recent elections is the maids at the Business School. Union members there charge Mulvihill boasted he could get "81 out of their (the maids) 85 votes." Several maids claim that they were approached before the elections and at the polls by men telling them to vote right, "if they liked working here."