Another Coop Election

WHEN ALL THE BALLOTS were counted, the results spoke for themselves. The management of the Harvard Cooperative Society scored a decisive victory over the United Food and Commercial Workers, when the store's employees rejected the union's bid to represent them for collective bargaining.

The vote no doubt stands as a sincere indication of the workers' predominant desire to keep the union out of the workplace and their wish to continue the same sort of employment relations that currently exist at the Coop.

Coop officials and employees sympathetic to the store's management responded by saying that the vote was no great victory, but an opportunity for employees to express their feelings on a particular issue. Although the employees have answered the union question, many questions about the Coop still remain:

Why did the Coop's management hire a professional union-busting consultant to direct its campaign to persuade workers to vote against the union?

Did the management's hard-core anti-union tactics intimidate workers into voting for the management side?

Will the Coop work to improve wages, benefits, or employment policies to respond to the widespread worker discontent that originally led many employees to ask for union representation? Or will the management take this opportunity to savor its victory and do nothing to improve its treatment of the workers?

Furthermore, why are textbook prices so high at the Coop when the store obviously has enough money to charge its members less and still remain financially sound?

Why did the store, supposedly a cooperative chartered to serve students at Harvard and MIT, expand and build a branch in downtown Boston, a location which Coop managers can hardly claim serves student interests?

Who makes the decisions on the store's policies on these issues of union-busting, pricing and expansion? What role does the Coop's board of directors play, and why don't its student members represent the interests of their constituents in making policy decisions?

In short, if the Coop is truly a cooperative, exactly whom is it cooperating with?

We urge all Harvard students to take the upcoming opportunity to vote for student directors to the Coop and make an effort to settle this issue. A group of concerned students have organized as an alternative slate to the Coop stockholders' recommendations for the positions, which have too long been the highly-sought after tokens for resume-stuffers on their jaunt to business school. They are, in alphabetical order, Amy Banse, Jeff Brown, Meri Kane, Anita Landecker, Guy Molyneux, Jerome Rubin, Nancy Sinkoff, Indi Talwani and Rick Valelly. The members of the slate deserve support in what could be the first geniune effort to restore the Coop's original mission as a cooperative serving the Harvard and MIT communities.