Length of time in this position: 1 month

Name of person to whom you report: David Layzer

Statement of general functions or objectives of your position: To assist a professor in a wide range of academic activities and to take responsibility for seeing that the non-academic aspects of these activities are efficiently carried out.

Schroder's office is a sort of anteroom to her boss's; it opens onto a hallway in the modern building where she works, and her boss's office is through a door next to her desk. The room where Schroder works is neat and streamlined, with a picture window and various office accoutrements--a typewriter, filing cabinets, books, a phone. Schroder is making instant coffee from a plug-in pot, without a great deal of assurance. "See," she says, laughing, "I'm not one of those secretaries who makes coffee any more."

Her coffee-making days may be over, but Schroder's daily work routine is still largely similar to that of most secretaries here. She spends a good part of her nine-to-five workday sitting in her office typing for her boss. She adamantly insists she likes being a secretary--"Secretary can be a satisfying job if you can get respect," she says. "Secretaries are so used to menial tasks, doing what they're told, that they don't think. I'd like to see secretary raised to professional status."

Still, her unionizing activity seems to be the sustaining force in Schroder's career at Harvard, a career that until recently was dotted with disappointments and rude awakenings to the lot of secretaries here.

Because she is from Germany and came to America fairly recently, Schroder was probably less aware than the other secretaries here of what to expect at Harvard. Until 1967, when she left for America to join her fiance, Schroder was a reporter and editor for a newspaper in Dortmund. The set of associations between job and status in Germany and America are different enough that she did not think, as an American woman would have, that it was unusual for her to make a voluntary switch from journalist to mother's helper, her first American job.

Schroder's romance broke up, and after she had learned English fairly well she went to work at MIT as a technical trainee--a job that, contrary to her expectations, turned out to be mostly clerical. She became dissatisfied with her pay and status, and came to Harvard as a secretary in 1967.

She has been in various science departments here ever since, staying longest in the Physics Department and becoming less and less happy with her work as time went on. Schroder left Physics in October, after William M. Preston, director of the Physics labs, complained to the Personnel Department about the quality of her work. District 65 provided Schroder with a lawyer, and after a series of hearings and a month of paid suspension Personnel resolved the matter by relocating her with Layzer, one of Harvard's most liberal professors. "At first," she says, "I thought I had such a hard time because I was German, because I was foreign. But then I found out other people had the same problems. When you want a raise, you have to go in there by yourself. I went in there in Physics, and they told me there was no money in the budget. Then I saw other people who went in by themselves and got raises. I was isolated. It builds up and up until one day you think--God, it's too much. Something's got to be done."

Schroder's frustration built up over a long time, through days after days. For most of her time here, she dealt with it by finding satisfying outlets for her energies unrelated to her job. She has been working, for instance, on a novel about World War II and the years following it in Germany. The first four chapters are finished and they bear, on the surface, a strong resemblance to her own early life.

Schroder was born in 1940 in East Prussia, but her family moved in the middle of the war to Berlin, where her father was a designer for the Luftwaffe. Growing up in a city under siege made an impression on her that is vague, because she was so young, but nonetheless indelible.

"I remember things," she says. "I remember the bombs. It's a funny memory; I was so little. All you remember is people and dolls in there, in the houses, and running in and getting your dolls after your house was bombed. You remember noises. I'm still afraid of noises."

There was not a great deal of contact with the Nazis, no pervasive feeling of the evil of the society. Although Schroder's father worked for the Nazis he was never in the party himself, and Schroder remembers that once he hid an anti-Nazi in their attic, telling his children the man was a retarded uncle, unable to speak.

So Schroder looks back on the postwar period with pride, remembering the way people who had nothing worked together and pulled themselves back up. It was exactly the kind of inspirational sense of community that had been completely absent from her life and work at Harvard.

Last spring Schroder started to talk to other secretaries in the Physics lab, the Law School and elsewhere, people with the same kinds of complaints she had. The secretaries--there were only two or three at first, but more joined the group--started to meet once a week after work to talk and drink coffee. By late April, working in relative secrecy, they were talking to organizers of the Medical Area Employees Organizing Committee, a year-old group that was already affiliated with District 65. Towards the end of the school year the group, 20 strong by then, began to call itself the Harvard Employees Organizing Committee, publish a newsletter, and shop around for a union to join.