Mail Center Troubles Highlight 'Casual' Problem

Deep under the Science Center, the Harvard Yard Mail Center bustles with first-years checking party flyers and picking up letters home.

But behind the mailboxes is the front line in Harvard's battle to find and correctly pay former "casual workers."

"Casuals" are theoretically workers who works less than 17.5 hours per week or for no less than three months, and as a result receive no benefits and lower wages.

Over the summer, Harvard admitted that it had misclassified 400 to 500 employees who worked full-time as "casuals." In October, the University signed an agreement with the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) to fix the situation and allow these full-time "casuals" better pay, benefits and union membership.

But that promise was easier said than fulfilled. A decentralized University structure and a nightmarish paper trail have made it difficult to identify who exactly needs to get full-time benefits.

In the Harvard Yard Mail Center, this has been more than a clerical problem. One casual employee, refusing to interview and apply for the full-time job he already filled, was let go.

Another casual worker, put on edge by the prospect that she would lose her full-time spot in the changeover, lost her cool and allegedly shoved a supervisor during an argument.

She was fired. Because she was not a union member at her firing, this employee says she lacks a way to fight Harvard's decision through an independent appeal.

These two and their HUCTW allies say the mail center case shows how the lack of oversight and decentralization that created the casual labor problem continue to frustrate Harvard's attempts to rectify it.

The Mail Order

Problems in the mail center have led to a union appeal and a lawsuit on the part of the fired worker. University labor officials declined comment for this story, in part because of these ongoing proceedings.

This account of the mail center's difficulties was compiled from interviews with union officials, the two aggrieved workers and one worker's attorney.

Where non-union sources on this story exist, they are explicitly noted.

The problems with a lack of labor oversight at the mail center began, according to HUCTW Director Bill Jaeger, when it moved to the Science Center from Weld Hall earlier this decade.

In the new location, union officials say, half the workers were employed by the Science Center and the other half were paid by Harvard Yard Operations--a completely separate entity.

The two workers say there was a lack of oversight in the mail center that allowed these casuals to work as full-time employees without getting the appropriate benefits.

Last fall, mail center casual employee Gamal Mohamed approached HUCTW and said he was doing full-time work without full-time status.

It was the beginning of a fight that came to involve HUCTW, undergraduate labor activists and University officials. When the dust settled, Mohamed and another casual, Anabela Mazariegos, were no longer working in the mail center.

Refused Interview

Within the mail center last spring, the University chose to make casual workers apply for "full-time" positions doing the work they already did.

This process was done before Harvard's October announcement promising to convert the 400 to 500 casual workers to full-time status without any sort of application process.

Initially, Mohamed was converted outright to full-time status. Then he was told that he, too, had to apply to stay on in his position.

Mohamed balked at this process, and refused to interview for a job he already held.

Eventually, his contract expired and Mohammed left Harvard. But because he was briefly a full-time employee--eligible for HUCTW membership--Mohammed filed a grievance against the University through the union's mediation process, called "problem-solving."

This arbitration process includes Mohammed presenting his case to a Local Problem Solving Team which includes University and union officials as well as a few outside experts.

This process is still ongoing, and should produce a result by the end of the year. The team will either approve Mohamed's termination or rule that he was unfairly let go and should be rehired

When Push Came to Shove?

The process which Mohammed's appeal to HUCTW set in motion also affected other mail center employees.

Mazariegos was another casual mail center worker, a veteran of other work at the Business School.

Mazariegos says the announcement that casuals would have to interview for full-time jobs made her tense in the workplace.

"The mailroom reorganization plan has everyone fearing the loss of their jobs, and walking on egg-shells, fearing that any small thing can be used as an excuse for not rehiring us into the reclassified position," she wrote of her mindset last spring in a statement.

Into that "emotionally charged environment," as she termed it, walked a pair of students asking questions about casual labor problems, according to a University investigation which concluded last spring.

According to that investigation, the appearance of the two students led to a confrontation between Mazariegos and Paul Kelly, a supervisor from another part of the Science Center.

At one point, according to the report, Mazariegos "pushed [Kelly] with both hands."

Mazariegos denies that she touched Kelly. The University report concluded that there had been a "use of force," which was neither "acceptable or defensible." Mazariegos was fired.

Now, Mazariegos says she cannot find any forum for her grievance against Harvard outside of the University's own channels.

The Larger Problem

Even union officials admit that the mail center is a hot spot, an especially contentious workplace because of the low supervision and high percentage of casual workers.

"Overall, it has to be understood as an exceptional situation. It was an unusually blatant violation of the rules of the casual payroll," says HUCTW Director Bill Jaeger.

"Most of the problems that been uncovered in the last year are subtler shades of confusion than that...It is an illustration of the kind of the organizational problems that we get into with the heavy reliance on unbenefited workers," he continues

Still, the problem of finding and reclassifying casual workers is one that has proved baffling across the University.

The "books" that both the University afadsfasfasfasfnd the union worked on to find and compensate the casuals included a 70,000-line Microsoft Excel document.

"There's no central place--there's no one way of doing this," she says. "What happens at one school does not necessarily happen at another."

Business school professor D. Quinn Mills, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Employment and Labor Practices, says he is hoping to present the committee's findings before the spring.

Much of the committee's research has been simply just trying to collect questionnaires from casual workers to obtain basic information.