Harvard's Duplicity

THE PARTIAL text of a 1974 memorandum from Ropes and Gray, the University's law firm, to a Harvard official still unidentified, which turned up at a National Labor Relations Board hearing last week, revealed that Harvard changed the structure of its personnel office in 1972, in order to have a better case against a possible unionizing drive in the Medical Area.

The fact that Harvard made a fundamental change in the personnel structure under the guise of an administrative improvement is dishonest and reprehensible. The issue is that Harvard maintains that unions of University employees should be University-wide, and opposes bargaining units of a more limited scope, such as the one the Medical Area Employees Organizing Committee is presently trying to create in that area.

In order to demonstrate to the NLRB that such a bargaining unit is inappropriate under the National Labor Relations Act, Harvard has to show that the University is completely centralized and that the Medical Area is not in the least independent, but merely a subsidiary entity. In 1972, fearing an organizing drive such as the one which took place last year, and recognizing the fact that the Medical Area had a separate personnel office--a situation which University officials knew would endanger their position in the event of hearings such as are now taking place--Harvard revamped its personnel structure. Ropes and Gray apparently told Harvard to make the Medical Area personnel office a subsidiary of the general University office, and this they did. It seems that the sole reason for the change was to strengthen Harvard's case against a possible attempt to establish a union.

Harvard's dishonesty is perhaps less serious than the fact that the University compounded its wrong by attempting to use this new personnel structure as evidence to refute the organizing committee's claim that Medical Area employees "share a separate community of interest." The new structure does not make the Medical Area any less separate and distinct a part of Harvard, except on the organizational charts which Harvard has submitted to the NLRB.

The clerical and technical employees in the Medical Area should have a union; at-present these employees have no voice in the personnel policies that govern their lives. A University-wide union would require organizing 4,000 clerical and technical workers, spread throughout Cambridge, Boston, and Allston. The organizing committee has had a difficult enough task just trying to unionize the 800 employees in the Medical Area. But their drive is now almost over--all that remains is the NLRB ruling on their request to hold a union-forming election. Although Harvard maintains that its actions are motivated by administrative necessities, its insistence on a University-wide union appears to be an attempt to head off the entire organizing drive.

When and if the Cambridge clerical and technical workers form their union, the Medical Area group will probably work closely enough with them to offset the disadvantages of not having one large union. But now, the Medical Area employees are already organized. Considering the differences in the location and the nature of their work from other clerical and technical workers here, their request to be allowed to have their own bargaining unit should be granted. Harvard's attempts to change an administrative structure to stop such a union should be recognized as no more than a sham.