A Clerical Union

HARVARD'S SECRETARIES' wages start at a rate well below that of other Boston secretaries, and their pay raises have fallen far short of coincident increases in the cost-of-living. They will tell you that the University is stingy with promotions, and that starting secretaries don't make much less than those who have been on the payroll for three years.

Last week, however, the University's staff of 4000 clerical and technical workers showed signs that they would no longer tolerate Harvard's employment conditions. Efforts to league with District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America surfaced at both the Medical School and in Cambridge. Technical and clerical workers in the Medical Area--most of them at the Med School, the School of Public Health, and the Dental School--are already affiliated with District 65 and will soon petition the National Labor Relations Board for union certification.

John B. Butler, director of personnel, suggested last week that the University will contest a bid for unionization by the Medical Area workers on the grounds that they will not form the appropriate bargaining unit--that any local of District 65 must include all the University's clerical and technical workers.

The administration's reasons for attempting to block the unionizing effort clearly lie deeper than in an academic interest in maintaining University-wide organization. Any indications that the huge, sedentary bloc of largely-female clerical and technical workers is asserting its rights and will join a union poses grim possibilities for Harvard indeed: the costs to the University of negotiated wage increases or of a strike, for example. Certainly, Harvard would want to keep these workers disenfranchised.

The administration's protest can only be viewed as a stalling tactic, to force the well-organized Medical Area employees to wait up for their relatively disorganized counterparts in Cambridge. Harvard should encourage the organizing effort in the Medical Area and endorse its petition for unionization. In the meantime, the administration should redress the workers' grievances.

The less-unified Cambridge effort should get off the ground and bid for certification, hopefully before the summer, and, despite the contention of the Medical Area organizers, Cambridge workers should seek unionization in 'a University-wide local. Clearly, a union of workers that bridges the river would have more effect than two bodies with two bargaining agents but with essentially the same demands.