Year of the WORKER

For 30 years, Robert TRavers has worked all over Harvard University. He worked as a janitor in Radcliffe Yard, as a security guard at the Business School and as a parking attendant at the Science and Engineering lot on Oxford Street. In 30 years, though, Robert Travers says he's never seen a year like this one.

This year, Travers says, it wasn't only Ivory Tower academicians or hot- blooded students who raised campus consciousness on important social issues or who issued clarion calls for reform.

This year, thousands of members of Harvard's unionized work force joined the ranks of those calling for change.

They staged a rally in Harvard Yard with the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. They encircled Massachusetts Hall, offering Harvard's top administratiors a somewhat sarcastic "hug" of affection.

They lashed out publicly against the university bureaucracy, circulated petitions and- perhaps most notably- complained of on- the- job harassment and discrimination based on race, gender, and union activism.

In the case of the University's largest union, they even went six months without a contract until they got much of the wage increase and benefits package they wanted.

During the past 12 months, a time some might label the Year of the Worker at Harvard, it was employees like Robert Travers- people who work as janitors, security guards, secretaries and dining hall cooks- who issued the call for change at Harvard.

"It isn't the University that's the problem," says Travers. "it's the management- the people who run the departments. I've been here 30 years. It's never been this bad."

Many Harvard employees say this year has seen a dramatic escalation in union activity at the University. That is understandable, they say, given that all seven of the University's labor unions had contracts up for renegotiation.

But this year, they assert, was unique, because ordinary workers stood up to their bosses and took long- term, pent- up grievances public.

"I don't think it's accidental or coincidental that there are more complaints," says Bill Jaeger, director of the HArvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, which represents about 3,600 University employees.

"We've got a theory in this office," Jaeger says. "In the last few years, there's been a fanatical tendency towards decentralization- an extremist form of decentralization. Any center ot leadership has exerted less and less influence over managers."

Jaeger says the University's system of overseeing its personnel has broken down into an inefficient, bureaucratic morass that leaves supervision of workers to the whims of individual managers.

That stark assessment of the administration's performance marks a sharp contrast with what union leaders like Jaeger were saying just one year ago.

Then, Harvard bureaucrats and labor union activists alike were buoyant about the prospects for the University's new president, Neil L. Rudenstine, to lead his adminstration in forging a new and friendlier relationship with the