In late August the group decided on District 65 because of its openness and its success in the Medical Area, and it started to hold open meetings at which Schroder and others would talk in glowing, Utopian terms about the need for a union and especially about the quality of District 65. The Harvard Employees Organizing Committee was out in the open.

The committee is disparate and has a long way to go--clerical workers are the gypsies of universities, transient and difficult to organize--but it is working determinedly and, for Schroder at least, on a largely personal, not political, level.

"When I'm doing this I'm more interested in people than issues--only people-connected issues, but not issues," Schroder says. "I get incredible satisfaction from the union. It's incredibly satisfying to see people becoming less isolated and freer. I've found friends here. I can see people starting to lose their fear. Before the union, when secretaries would get together they would talk about recipes, or new dresses, or who they were going out with. Now people talk about their real feelings."

Schroder drags on her cigarette and leans forward, looking deadly serious. "It won't fail," she says. "It just won't. We have all the time in the world. We just can't fail. I just don't believe people can reject something that will make them happy. There's no way about it. No way."

* * * * *

Nowadays the Harvard Employees Organizing Committee is pretty well settled into a routine of unionizing activity--a routine that revolves around the Monday night meetings of its core committee, a close-knit group of about 20 that plans general strategy. After its meetings, most of the core committee repairs for a late dinner to Cardell's, an old steak-and-beer place on Brattle Street.

After one of their December meetings, a dozen members of the core committee are working on their second and third beers in Cardell's, clustered at a side table and looking happy. They had spent most of their meeting planning their Christmas party for the next week as a sort of culmination of their efforts so far; an organization that is as important to them for its emotional impact as for the concrete benefits they are confident it will bring. But the group's two main themes--union as economic savior and union as a restorer of personal dignity and solidarity--are inextricably linked, each one inevitably leading into the other. The distinction between the group's friendships and organizing activities is anything but rigid.

"We're not organized in a traditional way," Ron Burns, a member of the core committee, says. "The traditional way is to talk to people, use (union membership) cards, and build momentum. That's the AFL-CIO way."

"What's different about us?" says Fred King, a sixtyish committee member with flowing gray hair.

"We appeal to people's sense of responsibility," Burns says. "We're saying they've got a responsibility to work within a union. We use the cards to build an infrastructure..."

"...Rather than the other way around," says Jane Strunsky, another member.

"We like to show people, to educate them to what's going on," Schroder says. "We're sophisticated."

Someone asks whether the union is in part an outgrowth of the women's movement, since three-fourths of the group District 65 seeks to unionize are women. "No," Strunsky says. "We didn't grow out of a women's group."

Schroder, sitting across the table, gives Strunsky a sharp kick in the shin to shut her up--she has deviated from the correct line--and says, "We started with women and women's problems. At first, the men in the group felt uncomfortable. We started to bring men and women together with1