After Two-Year Deadlock, Cops, University Sign Contract

After a hard-fought two-year battle with Harvard negotiators, the officers of the Harvard University Police Department signed a new three-Year contract with the University in April.

Last fall, police and University negotiators had reached in impasse. Associate Director of Labor Relations Carolyn R. Young '76, who is generally regarded as one of Harvard's most relentless negotiators, said at the time she did not understand why negotiations had failed.

During the impasse, patrol officer Robert Kotowski, president of the patrol officers' union, expressed extreme frustration with Young and the negotiations' lack of progress.

Eventually Kotowski brought the cops' case to the Harvard community through a series of advertisements in student publications, buttons, stickers and a banner hanging from the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers office on Mass. Ave.

And Kotowski went public with several significant arrests the University had covered up--including that of a crazed man who carried a Glock pistol to just a few feet away from Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell before last year's Commencement exercises.

Officers also exposed poor working conditions in the department's 29 Garden Street headquarters. Puddles gathered in the station dressing room, asbestos tiles buckled and cracked and the department's shower was, in the words of one officer, unfit for canine use. "It was a morale issue." says the officer.

A new director of labor relations, Timothy R. Manning, joined Harvard in the fall and moved quickly to break the impasse. An agreement was inked April 6. "When I got involved in it, I would label the negotiations as a fairly orderly process," Manning says, "But ultimately, it was just a matter of getting the two sides to talk to each other."

"We got to a point where we were stuck but not really that far apart, and Tim [Manning] came in with a couple of new ideas that gave us a kick in the pants and pushed it through," says former police administrator Brian D. Sinclair '62.

The police got a raise, educational benefits and allocations for new guns, radios and other equipment, like the pepper mace now carried by all patrol officers. The department also had its facilities improved, including new showers.

But more important than material and financial gains, officers say, is the respect and recognition they feel they have won from the University.

"It made us feel recognized professionally," Kotowski says.

The excitement over finally reaching a settlement may be short-lived: since the three-year contract applies retroactively, the police will be back at the bargaining table in August of next year.