Harvard-Union Negotiations: From Closed Doors to Public Hearings

This fall most of the activity between Harvard and labor unions went on behind closed doors, in conference rooms where bargainers conducted a series of lengthy and crucial contract negotiations. These negotiations are now almost completely finished, and this spring's important Harvard-union events will move into the public forum in a series of National Labor Relations Board hearings designed to settle labor disputes.

By present indications there will be two NLRB hearings involving Harvard in the next two months, one over a dispute between two unions and the other over the unionization of Harvard's thousands of clerical and technical workers.

The first one starts this week in Boston, and follows complaints by the Boston Typographical Union about possible layoffs of 7 of its 17 members who work for the University Printing Office. The BTU now works only on hot-type printing equipment that Harvard, like newspapers and publishers across the country, is gradually phasing out in favor of faster and more efficient cold-type equipment. The Printing Office last month installed a new batch of cold-type typesetting equipment to replace some of its hot-type linotype machines.

As things stand now, the new cold-type machines are under the jurisdiction of the Graphic Arts International Union, an exclusively cold-type union that last spring won from the NLRB the right to organize Harvard's cold-type typesetters. But the BTU wants its own members retrained to work on the new equipment, not laid off to make room for new GAIU employees.

The BTU's chances in the hearing appear slim, the NLRB sanctioned the GAIU's jurisdiction over cold-type typesetters last spring, and it is not likely to reverse that decision less than a year later. So although the GAIU may not play a direct role in the hearings. Harvard will represent its position and probably win.

The BTU hearing's outcome will affect less than ten workers, but this spring's second hearing is likely to have far wider implications. Harvard will probably seek to convince the NLRB that a medical area employees group does not have the right to form a union local among the 800 clerical and technical workers in the medical area. The organizing committee will ask the NLRB this month to sanction a union-forming election at the medical area, and Harvard contends that the only appropriate union for clerical and technical workers here is a University-wide one.

By NLRB criteria, any group of workers whose members perform similar tasks in a similar setting may form a union. The issue at the medical area hearing will not be similar tasks but whether the medical area and the parts of the University on this side of the Charles are similar settings. If the organizing committee wins, it will hold an election, probably win and form a union: if it loses it could join forces with a similar group in Cambridge and prepare to wait another year or two for unionization.