Does Harvard Have a Responsibility to Make Employees Part of the Community

A relatively ugly, pale-green placard lies amid newspapers, bumper stickers and documents in the offices of Harvard's largest union, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW).

"One community of Harvard workers," the placard reads. But the rallying cry born from this year's campaign to make Harvard change its definition of "casual workers" is more than just a slogan.

For HUCTW officials and even members of Harvard's administration, it's a reminder of the unanswered question--does Harvard, being Harvard, have an extra responsibility to the "community" of workers it employs?

If one listens to the mantra of the student-driven Living Wage Campaign, Harvard is sitting on a piggy bank of wealth that its administrators don't want to share with its lowly paid workers.

For union officials, Harvard to them is not only professors and students, but secretaries and janitors and book-checkers. And they feel that the administration, in its attempt to weigh dollars and cents, misses the bigger moral picture.

But while Harvard's endowment is currently ballooning past $14 billion, University officials say their money is not some sort of catch-all slush fund. And, Harvard, quite apart from its educational mission, is a big business: It is the largest employer in Cambridge and the wealthiest university in the world.

Harvard, at least from Harvard's angle, should not be held to a higher standard for wages and employee treatment.

Who Belongs?

For the University, just trying to figure out the extent of the problem instituted the need for a full-time ad hoc Faculty committee to figure out exactly who was working at Harvard.

The Ad Hoc Committee on Employment Practices, formed this April, is a Faculty task force with five Faculty members, with three having extensive backgrounds in academic studies of labor.

Right now, of course, they still are in the "data gathering process" of slowly trying to collect data on Harvard's employees, culling information from computer records and from personal questionnaires.

"I'd hope to have a final report before the spring. We're not trying to delay this," says Weatherhead Professor of Business and Committee Chair D. Quinn Mills. "Frankly if the summer had not intervened, we might be done."

The committee has met seven times since April and two to three times over the summer but has been unable to get an accurate image of Harvard employment during the summer months of low-activity.

Outside the ad hoc committee, several Faculty members have publicly sided with the unions at times and have spoken out against the University's employment practices, citing the need for a more all-encompassing definition of the Harvard community.

Over 100 Faculty members signed a petition supporting the goals of the campaign, and Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West '74 even wrote them a $50 check.

What's At Stake

The results of the pending agreement will place 400 to 500 casuals onto the full-time payroll, but the University seems slow to deal with the wider moral questions surrounding the issue of casual employment. As a progressive institution that purports to value human dignity, collaboration, and experimentation, does Harvard have an extra responsibility to its employees?

A possible answer can be found in how much Harvard hews to the controversial practice of subcontracting--which allows them to pay market rates without being accused of cheating its own employees.

The University, according to an official who asked not to be identified, must also look at the market value for contract services.

"If we pay people more, then what does that do to the market?" the official says. "The University should pay for the market value of its employees."

On the whole, subcontracting provides numerous advantages to a university or a company looking for more efficient ways to do business.

For one, private companies tend to standardize training among

their employees, allowing a client institution to know the limitations of

its workers. Second, and most important, subcontracting tends to reduce labor costs so significantly that more workers can be employed than if the client directly hired its workers.

The example of Harvard's proprietary security force--once 150 strong, and now employing slightly more than 20--is indicative of what can happen when market forces force a company to become competitive.

Although Pinkerton and Security Systems International (SSI), the two main security subcontractors in the Boston area, will not disclose how much they charge the University, officials and the guards themselves say the figure is around half of what the University would pay to employ its own guards.

And given that SSI trains its guards more extensively than the University, physical resource managers can make a compelling case that their guards will perform more effectively, too.

So when considering the market and when considering efficiency, perhaps subcontracting is justified.

But what if Harvard has an additional responsibility--a mission to treat all those who work on campus as if they were members of the learning community?

As one administration official notes, the stars of Harvard may be big-name professors but none could do their jobs without a huge network of support staff.

Part of the problem may lie in the culture of the University. Like many other institutions of higher learning, the size of Harvard's bureaucracy continues to grow as its own structural needs continue to diversify.

Twenty years ago, Harvard didn't have as many graduate schools, didn't need hundreds of employees to manage its information technology, and had half as many museums as it does today. Add new dorms and the corresponding support staff, and it's easy to see how Harvard has grown in spite of itself.

Although no administrator would allow their name to be associated with the sentiment, many say that Harvard needs to do more to make its less visible employees feel more valued.

One day, they say, that might mean salaries above market values.

For now, it means ensuring that labor relations between Harvard and its unions stay smooth.