Building a Cause in the Office

Another day, another meeting. It's the first really cold, clear day in late November, and secretaries at the Business School are coming in to Kresge Hall for their lunch hour. Kresge, you understand, is one of the B-School's imposing, immaculate buildings--quiet, a mass of glass and brick, exuding the aura of Olympian top-management executive retreats. Over on one side of the ground floor is a cafeteria where some of the secretaries eat plastic-wrapped sandwiches and drink half-pint cartons of Lo-Fat milk off of plastic trays.

On this particular day quite a few of the secretaries, about 50 of them, are filing off with their lunches into a room with gold chandeliers and a long horseshoe of wooden tables. As they walk in they see at the far end of the room, sitting behind a table, a man and a woman conferring.

The woman is tall and thin, with short blondish hair; she looks vaguely unusual. Perhaps it is that she is so nervous and full of energy--her long arms and fingers constantly dart about, lighting cigarettes and touching her hair. She has big, quick-moving eyes that sweep the whole room as she talks.

The woman's name is Traudi Schroder, and she is a secretary at Harvard too. She is a German emigrant, 34 years old, and for the time being, devoted to the idea of forming a union for Harvard's 4000-odd clerical and technical workers. The secretaries coming into the room with their lunch trays are here to hear about the unionizing effort.

The man sitting next to Schroder, Peter Van Delft, will do most of the talking; he is an organizer of District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America, a New York-based clerical workers' union with which Schroder is affiliated. Van Delft is an extraordinary-looking man, especially when he is sitting down. Although he is short, wears non-descript clothes--corduroy trousers, a shirt open at the neck--and is getting paunchy, he is impressive from the neck up. He has a huge, craggy head and a bushy brown beard that blends into his bushy brown swept-back hair. His eyes are deepset, big and bulging. He has a cigarette dangling from his lips, bobbing up and down, unlit. Although Van Delft is barely whispering to Schroder, his voice is so deep and resonant that the secretaries can hear it as they enter the room.

Van Delft knows his pitch well and delivers it smoothly, just as he has before at Columbia, Barnard, Princeton, MIT, Harvard Medical School and all the other places he has been since he and District 65 several years ago got the idea of organizing clerical workers in universities. Every organizing meeting is different, of course--the secretaries here are older than their Cambridge counterparts, have been working for Harvard longer and are more suspicious about the idea of joining a union. When Schroder says, in her mild German accent, that District 65 is "the first union that has really looked at women's problems," the secretaries just sit passively. At a Faculty of Arts and Sciences organizing meeting, the women might have murmured their approval.

Still, Van Delft is on the case. A woman named Linda Brown introduces him--"We most of all want to feel that at the richest university in the world we should have a voice," she says--and Van Delft starts to speak in booming, reassuring tones, the unlit cigarette jouncing up and down in his mouth.

He begins to talk about District 65, telling the story of its secession from the AFL-CIO after quarrels over the Indochina war and minority representation in the union. "We advocated changes," he says, "and in 1968 we decided that no longer in good conscience could we continue in a union we so sharply disagreed with."

The secretaries look skeptical and start peppering Van Delft with questions--Do you have a closed shop? How much are union dues?--but Van Delft handles them well, explaining that District 65 has a union shop and low dues. This meeting, in fact, seems better than most. When Van Delft has had business elsewhere and couldn't make it, things seemed unfocused and less authoritative. Shroder, meanwhile, counterbalances Van Delft; she is funny where he is serious, impulsive where he is knowledgeable, Harvard-connected where he is alien.

Along towards one o'clock, an earnest young man, a member of District 65's Harvard organizing committee, raises his hand and says, "I think we should talk more about why we want to have a union. We haven't talked about this enough. Nobody's really said why we want a union. There's even some people who aren't here." The speech is hardly a brilliant stroke of organizing strategy; these meetings are supposed to be anything but long self-explanatory sessions. Schroder and Van Delft start to whisper and shuffle papers and the secretaries, their lunch hours almost over, shift in their seats and begin to get up to leave. The young man gives imploring gazes around the room as the secretaries file out, off to an afternoon back at their offices typing and answering the phone. Schroder reminds them as they go that they should come to the organizing committee's Christmas party a few weeks hence, and then she goes back across the river, to her own office at the Observatory.

* * * * *

Traudi Schroder wants a promotion from Secretary I Technical to Secretary II Technical, and to apply for it she had to fill out a seven-page job description. The form now neatly typed out and signed by her boss, begins like this:

Name: Gertraude L. Schroder

Department: Astronomy

Faculty: FAS

Length of time in this position: 1 month

Name of person to whom you report: David Layzer

Statement of general functions or objectives of your position: To assist a professor in a wide range of academic activities and to take responsibility for seeing that the non-academic aspects of these activities are efficiently carried out.

Schroder's office is a sort of anteroom to her boss's; it opens onto a hallway in the modern building where she works, and her boss's office is through a door next to her desk. The room where Schroder works is neat and streamlined, with a picture window and various office accoutrements--a typewriter, filing cabinets, books, a phone. Schroder is making instant coffee from a plug-in pot, without a great deal of assurance. "See," she says, laughing, "I'm not one of those secretaries who makes coffee any more."

Her coffee-making days may be over, but Schroder's daily work routine is still largely similar to that of most secretaries here. She spends a good part of her nine-to-five workday sitting in her office typing for her boss. She adamantly insists she likes being a secretary--"Secretary can be a satisfying job if you can get respect," she says. "Secretaries are so used to menial tasks, doing what they're told, that they don't think. I'd like to see secretary raised to professional status."

Still, her unionizing activity seems to be the sustaining force in Schroder's career at Harvard, a career that until recently was dotted with disappointments and rude awakenings to the lot of secretaries here.

Because she is from Germany and came to America fairly recently, Schroder was probably less aware than the other secretaries here of what to expect at Harvard. Until 1967, when she left for America to join her fiance, Schroder was a reporter and editor for a newspaper in Dortmund. The set of associations between job and status in Germany and America are different enough that she did not think, as an American woman would have, that it was unusual for her to make a voluntary switch from journalist to mother's helper, her first American job.

Schroder's romance broke up, and after she had learned English fairly well she went to work at MIT as a technical trainee--a job that, contrary to her expectations, turned out to be mostly clerical. She became dissatisfied with her pay and status, and came to Harvard as a secretary in 1967.

She has been in various science departments here ever since, staying longest in the Physics Department and becoming less and less happy with her work as time went on. Schroder left Physics in October, after William M. Preston, director of the Physics labs, complained to the Personnel Department about the quality of her work. District 65 provided Schroder with a lawyer, and after a series of hearings and a month of paid suspension Personnel resolved the matter by relocating her with Layzer, one of Harvard's most liberal professors. "At first," she says, "I thought I had such a hard time because I was German, because I was foreign. But then I found out other people had the same problems. When you want a raise, you have to go in there by yourself. I went in there in Physics, and they told me there was no money in the budget. Then I saw other people who went in by themselves and got raises. I was isolated. It builds up and up until one day you think--God, it's too much. Something's got to be done."

Schroder's frustration built up over a long time, through days after days. For most of her time here, she dealt with it by finding satisfying outlets for her energies unrelated to her job. She has been working, for instance, on a novel about World War II and the years following it in Germany. The first four chapters are finished and they bear, on the surface, a strong resemblance to her own early life.

Schroder was born in 1940 in East Prussia, but her family moved in the middle of the war to Berlin, where her father was a designer for the Luftwaffe. Growing up in a city under siege made an impression on her that is vague, because she was so young, but nonetheless indelible.

"I remember things," she says. "I remember the bombs. It's a funny memory; I was so little. All you remember is people and dolls in there, in the houses, and running in and getting your dolls after your house was bombed. You remember noises. I'm still afraid of noises."

There was not a great deal of contact with the Nazis, no pervasive feeling of the evil of the society. Although Schroder's father worked for the Nazis he was never in the party himself, and Schroder remembers that once he hid an anti-Nazi in their attic, telling his children the man was a retarded uncle, unable to speak.

So Schroder looks back on the postwar period with pride, remembering the way people who had nothing worked together and pulled themselves back up. It was exactly the kind of inspirational sense of community that had been completely absent from her life and work at Harvard.

Last spring Schroder started to talk to other secretaries in the Physics lab, the Law School and elsewhere, people with the same kinds of complaints she had. The secretaries--there were only two or three at first, but more joined the group--started to meet once a week after work to talk and drink coffee. By late April, working in relative secrecy, they were talking to organizers of the Medical Area Employees Organizing Committee, a year-old group that was already affiliated with District 65. Towards the end of the school year the group, 20 strong by then, began to call itself the Harvard Employees Organizing Committee, publish a newsletter, and shop around for a union to join.

In late August the group decided on District 65 because of its openness and its success in the Medical Area, and it started to hold open meetings at which Schroder and others would talk in glowing, Utopian terms about the need for a union and especially about the quality of District 65. The Harvard Employees Organizing Committee was out in the open.

The committee is disparate and has a long way to go--clerical workers are the gypsies of universities, transient and difficult to organize--but it is working determinedly and, for Schroder at least, on a largely personal, not political, level.

"When I'm doing this I'm more interested in people than issues--only people-connected issues, but not issues," Schroder says. "I get incredible satisfaction from the union. It's incredibly satisfying to see people becoming less isolated and freer. I've found friends here. I can see people starting to lose their fear. Before the union, when secretaries would get together they would talk about recipes, or new dresses, or who they were going out with. Now people talk about their real feelings."

Schroder drags on her cigarette and leans forward, looking deadly serious. "It won't fail," she says. "It just won't. We have all the time in the world. We just can't fail. I just don't believe people can reject something that will make them happy. There's no way about it. No way."

* * * * *

Nowadays the Harvard Employees Organizing Committee is pretty well settled into a routine of unionizing activity--a routine that revolves around the Monday night meetings of its core committee, a close-knit group of about 20 that plans general strategy. After its meetings, most of the core committee repairs for a late dinner to Cardell's, an old steak-and-beer place on Brattle Street.

After one of their December meetings, a dozen members of the core committee are working on their second and third beers in Cardell's, clustered at a side table and looking happy. They had spent most of their meeting planning their Christmas party for the next week as a sort of culmination of their efforts so far; an organization that is as important to them for its emotional impact as for the concrete benefits they are confident it will bring. But the group's two main themes--union as economic savior and union as a restorer of personal dignity and solidarity--are inextricably linked, each one inevitably leading into the other. The distinction between the group's friendships and organizing activities is anything but rigid.

"We're not organized in a traditional way," Ron Burns, a member of the core committee, says. "The traditional way is to talk to people, use (union membership) cards, and build momentum. That's the AFL-CIO way."

"What's different about us?" says Fred King, a sixtyish committee member with flowing gray hair.

"We appeal to people's sense of responsibility," Burns says. "We're saying they've got a responsibility to work within a union. We use the cards to build an infrastructure..."

"...Rather than the other way around," says Jane Strunsky, another member.

"We like to show people, to educate them to what's going on," Schroder says. "We're sophisticated."

Someone asks whether the union is in part an outgrowth of the women's movement, since three-fourths of the group District 65 seeks to unionize are women. "No," Strunsky says. "We didn't grow out of a women's group."

Schroder, sitting across the table, gives Strunsky a sharp kick in the shin to shut her up--she has deviated from the correct line--and says, "We started with women and women's problems. At first, the men in the group felt uncomfortable. We started to bring men and women together with1