IT LOOKS LIKE the 900 unionized Harvard employees who will be getting new contracts this month or next are getting a bad deal from the University. In a year with inflation rates of over 10 per cent, most of Harvard's maintenance and custodial employees will probably be signing for pay raises of between 7 and 8 per cent.

Part of the fault for the inadequate pay raises lies with the two unions that negotiated them. One, the Harvard University Employees Representative Association, is a completely in-house union and therefore has little real financial strength or bargaining power. The other, the Maintenance Trades Council of New England, is broader based but severely hurting financially. Most of the trades council's still-continuing negotiating with Harvard has been done by officials of its central office, not its workers at Harvard, and as a consequence the focal point of the negotiations has been benefits that would strengthen the financial position of the union but not of its members at Harvard.

But the University's general position on the role of non-teaching personnel at Harvard makes it especially easy for its bargainers to push through inadequate wage increases in negotiations with weak unions.

John B. Butler, director of personnel, said in an interview last week: "The primary responsibility of Harvard is education and research. If you go back to the earliest definition the primary thing is teacher and student. That's ideal or something. But you can't do that. Our goal is to have quality education at minimum expense."

Butler uses Harvard's status as an educational institution as an excuse for a wage-squeezing few other employers of 6000 workers would dare voice. All of Harvard's trappings of prestige and learning make very little difference to its workers, and cannot be a substitute for wages or, just as important, respect. When workers know their employers view them as an adjunct and not what they really are--a part of the University just as essential as professors or students--it makes it very difficult to work here happily.

Harvard should stop treating its workers like second-class citizens, unworthy even of the minimal respect workers get in industry or business. Its status as a university does not change its status as a major employer and corporation. Sooner or later the University will have to stop using its academic functions as a convenient shield against the intrusions of real-world responsibilities, and give its employees the pay and respect they deserve.