Employees Picket Health Plan Offices

A labor dispute at Harvard Community Health Plan (HCHP) spilled over into the streets of downtown Boston yesterday afternoon, as a chanting, sign-carrying contingent of 40 local unionists staged a two-hour "informational picket" at HCHP's Kenmore Center clinic.

The picketers, members of Service Employees International Union Local 285, work in lower-wage occupations on the clinic's non-medical support staff. They demanded a wage increase of 6 percent and a 30-minute reduction in their eight and one-half hour work day. Workers also picketed at HCHP's smaller Cambridge Center yesterday.

"We haven't ruled out a strike," Local 285 Executive Director Nancy Mills said. She added, however, that "We'd have to consider the decision to strike very seriously beforehand because we feel a certain responsibility to the patients."

Mills said that Local 285 is weighing unspecified "other options" for strengthening its collective bargaining position, adding that "We're determined to carry the fight through."

Though the University has no official role in formulating HCHP labor relations policy, HCHP is one of 17 Boston-area health care institutions affiliated with the Medical School, and many Medical School physicians treat the organization's members.

The picketing service workers charged that HCHP management has "upside down priorities" because it has refused to grant them the same 6 percent pay raise it recently gave HCHP doctors.

"We're the backbone of the Health Plan," Gail Miles, a member of the union's negotiating committee, said. "Without us, they [the doctors] can't see their patients."

Union leaflets also criticized HCHP for "lavish" spending on office parties and management vacations in the face of its call for employee "belt-tightening." The leaflets called HCHP's offer of a 2 percent pay boost "an insult."

Response

But in an official statement released yesterday, Margaret Ives, director of personnel for HCHP, said that when "ment pay" provisions in the current contract are taken into account, the management offer provides the average employee with an increase of 8 percent, not 2 percent as the union claims.

Ned Wight, a spokesman for HCHP, said the union's comparison of workers' and doctors' pay boosts is unrealistic. "The relevant comparison is to other workers of the same type at other institutions," he explained.

He declined to comment on the union's demand for shorter hours.

Unusual Clause

The union is pressing its demands under an unusual "reopener" clause in its two-year contract. Rather than setting wages for both years, the contract calls for management to make a new wage offer at the end of the first year. If the offer increase wages by less than 75 percent of the year's rise in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the union has the right to negotiate for more.

Both sides acknowledge that HCHP's offer failed to keep pace with the CPI, but, according to Mills, they differ on how to such a "creative solution" to the difficult problem of raising wages in a time of economic recession

Mills said the union's twin demands for a shorter work day and more pay is a compromise position and reflects Local 285's view that "we realize it's hard times and we're not looking for wage gains like we've gotten in the past"

She added that the union was willing to defer the pay hike until April 1983. But, said Mills, management has given all the union's proposals "a flat no."

Wight said HCHP would have no comment in response to the union's charges of management intransigence. "We think the ments of a labor dispute are best discussed in collective bargaining," he sai