Chapter from Dickens

It was not the maids themselves who impressed their plight upon the Administration, but rather the probing eye of the Boston press. In 1930, the University fired 20 scrub women rather than give them a two-cent an hour raise. Coming on the same day as the University received a five million dollar unrestricted donation, the act gave the University some two solid months of the worst publicity it has ever received. The Boston world looked at these women scrubbing the marble floors of Widener on their hands and knees for starvation wages and called the picture like a chapter from Dickens. The Post pictured a bleated man with a Phi Beta Kappa key throwing pennies to an emaciated woman kneeling at his feet.

The stereotype of a grasping Administration scowling at the poor was established. The publicity came even harder when it was learned that Yale paid its maids four cents less per hour than Harvard.

The scrubwomen rumpus shocked the University out of its unenlightened attitude.

The maids got a locker room in the House basement, and saw their eight a.m. check in hour moved up to nine. Finally, in 1936, the University agreed to scrap the employer employee relationship that left every maid for herself, and recognize a union as the official intercessor.

Maids who were here in the dog bays of the thirties claim that it was the union that proved the key to their present satisfaction with their jobs. From 1940, to the present, the history of the Employees' Representative Union Showa a steady oroison of hours and increase in wages until now, at 20 hours and $.96 an hour, they are as well off as any other college maids in the country.

To the maids, the success of the HUERA is summed up in one person, Daniel G. Mulvihill. Called by the maids "the man in the office", Mulvihill has been their champion against periodic abuses by a large and impersonal University. Grievances, like a sudden increase in the work load, which used to die in the lower administrative echelons, now go directly to the top through Mulvihill. A vigorous and colorful man, Mulvihill enjoys his role as occupational father to the ladies he likes to call the students' "mothers away from home."

Routed Porters

But better wages and work conditions have not led the maids to become lazy in their newly-founded contentment. Their work still meets standards of inspection set 35 years ago. In terms of customer satisfaction, they routed their potential competitors, the student porters, last year in Dunster House in the very first skirmish.

If anything has changed through the years, it has not been the maids, but the students they serve. The old timers, who remember the Gold Coast days, agree that students were richer then than now, and that their rooms showed it. They also think the present crop of students are sloppier now than in the days of plush carpets and chaises-lounges. In their daily trip through the private lives of students they have been able to observe these changes, but they have not colored their attitudes toward the frowzy youth in the pajamas they see each morning. He may be the poorest and sloppiest man in College, but he's still "my boy."'