Ed Powers: A Lawyer As Harvard's Labor Boss

Harvard is up to its neck in labor difficulties. The National Labor Relations Board heard two Harvard labor disputes during the past year, one of which is still pending; sex discrimination complaints at Harvard and elsewhere are on the rise; three major contracts between the University and unions either have already or will expire this fall. "We don't need a union to tell us we have problems," Edward W. Powers, Harvard's new director of employee relations, says.

Powers left his job in state government to replace William N. Mullins as the University's chief labor negotiator last spring. Mullins's actual title was manager of employee relations, and he reported to Harvard's director of personnel, who, in turn, was (and still is) answerable to the vice president for administration. As a director, however, Powers is on the same level as John B. Butler, the personnel chief, and reports directly to the University's general counsel, Daniel Steiner '54. The increasingly legalistic nature of labor relations at Harvard forced this change in the administrative structure. The University, or perhaps more precisely Steiner, felt that the labor post had become a job for a lawyer, which Powers is, and which Mullins was not.

Powers believes that there is a great deal of "work environment motivation" at Harvard, that employees here have a sense of identification with the University that comparable workers in the private industry or the public sectors lack. He hastens to emphasize, however, that Harvard is no workers' paradise. "Some changes are certainly necessary here," Powers says, "and our goal in this office is to identify problem areas and deal with them as quickly as possible."

"I realize we aren't handling the problems of internal equity well enough," Powers adds, but he questions whether employees at Harvard can find all the solutions to their problems in the traditional industrial union structure. "What we have here in many cases is a 'mechanism' problem--workers are frequently unable to identify a management structure. This issue is particularly evident in the Medical area dispute."

But Powers will have a good deal more to keep him busy during the next few months than the theoretical questions he handles so articulately. In the Medical Area, District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America, the union chosen by a majority of the clerical and technical employees, petitioned the NLRB in February for permission to hold a union-forming election. Harvard opposes the petition, maintaining that the only appropriate bargaining unit for these workers, under the National Labor Relations Act, would be University-wide.

After months of hearings, the case is now pending before the NLRB's New England regional director Robert Fuchs. If the board favors Harvard, and Powers professes absolute confidence that it will, the union question for the Medical Area will have been effectively laid to rest. But if District 65's petition is upheld after the resolution of a few minor issues related to membership in the bargaining unit, Powers and Harvard will have the touchy problem of an NLRB administered union election--with all its attendant difficulties--on their hands, possibly before the end of the academic year.

Harvard maintains that it has precedent on its side in the District 65 case. As Steiner wrote in a memorandum to Medical Area personnel during the summer, "In our view none of the 15 or so precedents supports the union's position. In a case involving Tulane, for example, the board found that an appropriate unit must include employees at the main campus and those at a Medical Center five miles from the main campus, and at research centers 15 to 40 miles from the main campus."

The union, on the other hand, devoted a great deal of time and money last spring in an effort to prove to the NLRB that the Medical Area is an almost completely autonomous part of Harvard. Harvard is certainly not taking the case lightly. Whichever side loses here will probably appeal to the national board in Washington, D.C.

While the Medical Area issue is Powers's major concern at the moment, other potential conflicts are brewing in Cambridge. The Harvard University Employees Representative Association, an unaffiliated union which speaks for 500 custodians, has a contract which expires November 30.

Harvard also faces negotiations with the Maintenance Trades Council (MTC), an AFLCIO umbrella union representing 353 Harvard workers. The present contract will terminate on December 7, and a major internal dispute in the MTC is likely to complicate the negotiating process. Most MTC members at Harvard belong to the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 877, which, at the moment, is at loggerheads with the four other labor units in the MTC--Local 103 of the electrical workers, Local 12 of the plumbers, the District Council of Carpenters, and District Council 35 of the painters. Harvard is watching the situation closely in hopes that the rift will be healed before the MTC contract is up and negotiations begin. Powers would like to have to deal with only one set of demands.

The third labor force which Harvard has to contend with this fall is the Patrolmen's Association, the union for the 50 members of th Harvard University Police Force. The cops are now working without a contract, a development pretty much par for the course in view of the history of negotiations between Harvard and the P.A. All talks so far have been fruitless, and even though Powers says he expects the dispute to be resolved, both parties have called the situation a stalemate, and a state mediator has been called in.

Because these three unions intend to demand pay raises consistent with the massive rise in the cost of living, it is likely that the negotiating process in each case will be extremely arduous. Harvard is adamant about not meeting exact increases in the cost of living, which is the very cause of the present impasse in the police negotiations.

Ed Powers will also have issues of more limited scope to worry about this year. Powers expects a rising number of sex discrimination complaints by women--consistent with the national trend--but that Harvard will have few legitimate cases to deal with. Complaints by homosexuals claiming discrimination may also surface at Harvard this year, in view of the growing gay rights movement in the Boston area. But Powers says that the University's policy of non-interference with the sexual lives of its employees should limit the number of grievances of this nature.

Women's issues and charges of sex discrimination are considerably more likely to arise than gay complaints at the University--indeed, the organizing drive in the Medical Area has a decisively feminist character. With or without a recognized union as a mouthpiece, the grievances of these 900 workers will not simply vanish.

The impending contract negotiations are, nonetheless, Harvard's primary labor concern this fall. It's difficult to say whether strikes are a real possibility, but the thought doesn't faze Powers. "It's bad labor relations to overreact to strikes," Powers says, "In fact the worst thing to do is feign toughness and not be tough."

"The 'firm but fair' dictum still holds," Powers says. Whether Harvard's labor unions will be able or willing to accept the University's definition of fairness is of course another question.