After Bad Blood A Time for Fairness

FOR ABOUT six months union veterans have been making inroads around the University, hoping to organize Harvard's 3800 clerical and reclaimed workers. They have a tough job ahead of them, because they represent a union Harvard has fought fiercely, and thus far successfully, for a decade.

Harvard officials make no apologies for their firm opposition--they do not think unions are necessarily best for the University. But this drive has the potential to be extremely bitter. The union, Harvard UAW, has its roots with a group of women workers in the Medical Area who began organizing prevents ago Harvard opposed that drive through two elections and several trips to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), fostering a great deal of ill will on both sides. From the start, Harvard opposed the drive on the grounds that clerical and technical workers from only one area of the University should not be entitles to their own union because they do work similar to similar employees campus-wide, all of whom are centrally administered.

Lather this month Harvard finally got what it wanted. The NLRB over turned a 1977 decision which had entitled their Medical Area workers to from their own union, forcing Harvard UAW to now organize campus-wide a much more difficult task.

What is note worthy about the ruling is just how hard Harvard was willing to work for it. The General Counsel's office spent a great deal of time and money keeping the case active, lobbying for reconsideration. Even if the union had won one of the elections in 1977 or 1981. Harvard would have ignored the 1977 NLRB ruling and refused to negotiate with the union, forcing the matter into the courts--where it probably would have remained for years to get its side a second hearing. Harvard's financial and legal resources won this moth's decision and would probably have prevailed over a fledgling union in a lengthy court battle.

such a determinedly anti-union stance is inappropriate at a reportedly liberal institution. Both earlier organizing drives saw bitter propaganda, with each side trying to sway the secretaries, administrative aides, researchers and lab technicians who would vote whether or not to have the union represent them. There were allegations of impropriety on both sides and it is almost curtain that such bitterness will resurface if the union gathers sufficient strength.

But the University must be wary of using unfair leverage to oppose the union' Workers have the right to unionize and Harvard must respect that right Certainly the University can, and should, push the home team in the months before an election. But Harvard must not interfere with the drive itself. Last year the NLRB cleared the University of any wrong-doing in the 1981 election, but this month's ruling is testimony to Harvard's power--either through intimidation or legal manuvering to prevent workers the chance to unionize if they so desire.