A Struggle for Empowerment

Five years after the formation of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, union members are still mired in...

Five years ago this week, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers was forged from demands for more respect, money and power for Harvard's large but often unrecognized support staff.

The union, now 3,500 members strong, instigated a long-term, on-and-off battle with the University in the courtroom and over the negotiating table, culminating in a collective bargaining agreement ratified June 29, 1989.

One of the union's most vocal rallying calls has been, and continues to be, greater employee empowerment. To this end, the 1989 pact's first article established problem-solving "joint councils" of union members and managers across the University.

Today, the University has almost 40 joint councils, and with a celebration of the union's fifth anniversary this week and the renewed support for joint councils in the second union contract approved January 7 this year, it might seem that "employee empowerment" is working.

Despite some concrete achievements, however, the joint councils have a mandate more for discussion than for action, management is often still distant from workers and union members agree that not enough workers feel they are a part of the joint councils.

On February 13, 1989, a union-management team issued a preliminary "Understanding" that included an emphasis on the importance of joint communication and problem-solving between managers and union members.

With this goal in mind, the two sides agreed on the formation of joint councils, outlined in Article I of the collective bargaining agreement and reaffirmed in the new agreement negotiated last fall.

"The Council is intended to be a forum for the discussion of all workplace matters which have a significant impact on staff," reads the agreement. "Such discussions may include an evaluation of current policies affecting staff as well as consideration of proposed changes in policies or in work force arrangement affecting staff."

Lamont University Professor Emeritus John T. Dunlop, Harvard's chief negotiator for the first agreement, says he is personally in favor of greater employee participation in management decisions. Moreover, he says that the joint council structure is well-suited to the varied, spread-out organization of the University.

"I think that it is particularly appropriate in a highly decentralized university," he says, citing the different priorities and rules in each of Harvard's largely autonomous units. "The alternate approach to a joint council is to have very much more-detailed rules in the master agreement."

Dunlop, who was recently appointed by President Clinton as the head of a national commission on worker-manager relations in the United States, argues that the joint councils help ensure a more productive, efficient work-place.

Bill Jaeger, director of the union of clerical and technical workers (HUCTW), agrees with Dunlop. "There's a trend among academics and scholars who write about management--everyone's writing about the flattening of hierarchy and more employee involvement," he says. "Ideas like that are flying around all the time. Bill Clinton's election...started a whole new wave."

Jointness in management, say Jaeger and Dunlop, have been a frequent topic of labor-related articles during the past few years. A 1992 book by economics professors Barry Bluestone and Irving Bluestone, Negotiating the Future, claims that greater inclusion of employees in management is necessary for the economy to operate as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

"The traditional work organization [is] a workplace that exhibits the self-defeating mindset that the individual worker is no more than an adjunct to the company," the book argues, "and that the natural management between management and labor must be hierarchical and adversarial."

"Mixing adversarial and cooperative relations...proves in one study after another to be the most successful form of employee involvement for all stakeholders," say the Bluestones.

But while Harvard managers and employees say the advent of the joint councils has been one of the most positive results of the union's focus on employee empowerment, even supporters say the councils need improvement.

There are 29 main joint councils at the University: one at each of the graduates schools and at Radcliffe, as well as 9 in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and several others representing central administrative departments, Harvard libraries and academic and non-academic centers and programs.

Nine other subdivisions of joint councils have been set up to deal with specific issues, and there is also a University joint council.

"There are different expectations now than I think there were four, five years ago of how workers should be involved in the workplace at Harvard," says Donene M. Williams, president of the union. "It used to be 'can we do that?' Now it's 'what do we do about it?'...It's a place where the union and the University can work together at the top levels."

Adrienne P. Landau, co-chair of the University Health Services (UHS) joint council, says her group has definitely given her more confidence in her job.

"My training and my experience and the sanction I've had to participate actively in life at UHS has given me more self respect," says Landau, a secretary in the office of health education. "I have more courage to express myself both within our department and more willingness to participate in life at UHS."

Joel C. Monell, administrative dean of the Education School and the management co-chair for the school's joint council, says his group has had several concrete achievements.

"I think we've been able to maintain a high level of workplace life for both workers and management," he says.

Recently, Monell says, his joint council formed a series of focus groups on career development for both union members and non-union clerical and technical workers--an issue the union has been pushing.

Monell's group also found issues of safety in the workplace pressing enough to form a subordinate joint council for health and safety, Monell says, part of a growing trend of sub-councils.

Both the Law School and the Kennedy School joint councils have formed sub-councils to focus on relations between faculty members and their assistants. Shari Levinson, a staff assistant at the Kennedy School faculty-faculty assistant joint council, says the groups were formed to get professors and staff talking to each other.

"A lot of strange things happen around this school because of not enough communication" she says. "There were very few [other times] when faculty members and faculty assistants sat down together."

Levinson feels the new joint council makes life easier for faculty as well, citing the creation last fall of an orientation program for new faculty members.

The joint councils, however, were originally meant to be forums of discussion, not decision-making bodies. As a result, not all joint councils can cite such tangible examples of their progress.

"There hasn't been the space yet for us to make real changes," says Nona D. Strauss, co-chair of the applied and physical sciences joint council and director of the Science Center. "We try to find generic issues that we really can affect, rather then policy issues that will be decided in another forum."

Steven B. Moomfield '77, a program director at Harvard's Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities, says the program's joint council, of which he is co-chair, has mostly focused on promoting dislogue is general rather than implementing changes.

"I would not say we've had yards of concrete achievements, but rather that issues have come up that have been able to be solved," he said. "We tend to be, somewhat appropriately, reactive."

Moreover, union members say the effectiveness of the joint councils depends in large part on whether managers are willing to listen to employees and accept their input.

Often, Landau says, managers don't realize the benefits they gain from having more involved, more productive employees.

"It's like the feet of a duck," she says. "You don't see them because they're under the water. The duck looks like it's swimming gracefully across the water, but underneath it's paddling furiously. sometimes I get frustrated--I think it just takes time."

Barbara C. Yearkes, a secretary in the Physics Department who serves as the other co-chair for the applied and physical sciences joint council, says that she feels that Science Center Director Strauss, who worked her way up from staff member to manager, is very sympathetic to employees' feeling of powerlessness. But not all managers feel the same way, she says.

"I think we have a say in what goes on, but the managers don't really carry it further. They don't act on it," says union member Susan M. Barry, a staff assistant in the UHS Medical Records Department.

"What we're trying to do is different than what's been done at the University before and some people have problems dealing with it," says union President Williams, who has served on joint councils at the School of Public Health and the Law School. "It's a power-sharing relationship--some people don't want to share power."

Patricia A. Erb, a union member and staff assistant in the Mental Health Department at UHS, says that the going is slow at times. "Some managers, I think, are very open," she says, "while others sort of not their heads and then do whatever they want. It's like a creaking, old rusty machine."

Erb says, though, that some frustration union members still feel with the work-place also rises out of a common perception that the joint councils are remote from the average worker.

Williams says this is one of the top worries of union officials. "Making the joint councils connected to every worker is something we have a goal towards achieving--I don't think they are connected right now," she says. "People who aren't connected to them and don't understand them don't have any idea what they do."

Erb says the councils need to publicize themselves more. "I'd say the average person has heard of the joint council but doesn't know who's on it, or what issues they discuss."

Barry says, "A lot of people are aware of it, but not involved...I don't think people are aware of how much power they have."