One day in 1938, Joseph A. Stefani made himself a T-shaped frame with two glass arms--one breakable, one unbreakable--and went down to Harvard to convince the dining hall workers to join Local 186 of the Cooks and Pastry Cooks Association, American Federation of Labor, instead of an in-house union.

At that time Harvard was, after three hundred and two years of its existence," as Stefani likes to put it not unionized at all. When Stefani went in to organize the kitchen workers the University kicked him out because he didn't work there, so he had to do his organizing in the cellar of a sympathetic bar.

Stefani had already made substantial progress by the time he made the T-frame, but it was to be his master stroke, the tactical device that would sweep in the Cooks and Pastry Cooks Union.

"I told these people a company union was no good," Stefani says. "It couldn't strike, I said we have our international. I had a mallet with me: bang, and the glass on the left went to smithereens. I said the AF of I was much stronger. I hit my mallet on the unbreakable glass and it cracked, so there's the difference. So we got in," The Cooks were the first union to organize successfully in an American university.

Now, 38 years later, Joe Stefani is going on 81 years old and is in his 39th year as business agent of Local 186. He is a thickset man with a rasping voice and a hearing aid tucked behind his ear. Things aren't going so well for Stefani these days. He has a hard time getting people to come to union meetings--they say the neighborhood of the union hall is unsafe at night--but 30 years ago the meetings were jammed, while the union was coming into its own. There were even classes for shop stewards--Stefani has faded photographs from years of annual shop steward graduation nights--but now Stefani does not even know how many shop stewards he has among his 550 members at Harvard, the biggest single bloc of his union.

At Harvard two new, militant shop stewards are trying to work substantial changes in the Harvard Cooks' relationship both to the University and to the local's central bureaucracy--especially Stefani, the man who has dominated the Cooks' relationship with Harvard since he scored his greatest triumph here in 1938.

The two stewards are young enough, respectively, to be Stefani's son and grandson; their politics and their view of the relationship between labor leadership, management and workers are substantially different from Stefani's. The relationship between Stefani and his Harvard shop stewards was a direct adversary one for a time last fall, but now they seem to have reached an uncomfortable truce. Stefani will almost certainly be involved in negotiations this spring for a new contract between Harvard and the Cooks, but he says he will not run for re-election as business agent when his present term expires in October. Still, there appears to be substantial difference of opinion as to who will run the show at the spring negotiations, Stefani or the Harvard Cooks.

The shift in the Harvard Cooks' attitude first became apparent in December, when Sherman L. Holcombe, the newly-elected shop steward at Radcliffe's dining halls, submitted a list of grievances about Harvard and Stefani to the Personnel Office. Holcombe, a 45-year-old former truck driver, complained that Harvard was not listing fully its work reflied its and joy openings, and that the union was overcharging workers on their dues. He also asked that Harvard find year-round dining room employment for union members, rather than giving them different jobs during the summer.

"Holcombe was very nasty to me," Stefani says. "In fact, I wrote him a letter. You need a lot of education, I says. When a person is ignorant they say many things they don't understand."

Holcombe has mixed feelings about Stefani. At one point in a recent interview he said he is "dissatisfied with Stefani," but a little later on he said, "Stefani has done what I asked: I presented him with grievances. He answered and has given me good advice to being a shop steward at Harvard." Holcombe now insists his gripes are with Harvard, not Stefani, but he says it is his "dream" to be in on the negotiations this spring.

For his part, Stefani sees the negotiations as basically his show. "The trouble is with the workers," he says. "They want to come in and ask up here"--he holds his hand far above his head--"and I try to get 'em down to here"--he moves his hand to eye level. "Then we sit down and bargain and bargain until the business agent decides we pushed them as far as we can push them. We don't really need a negotiating committee [of Harvard workers], but we want to show them how hard it is to get things from the employers."

Sherman Holcombe says he has one here--Alan Balsam, a 23-year-old, politically radical Brandeis alumnus who is shop steward of the College dining halls. Balsam, an intense man who wears rimless glasses, is a curiously complementary figure to Stefani. He got a job in the Brandeis dining halls after his graduation and organized the workers there into the Cooks and Pastry Cooks, leaving shortly thereafter for a higher-paying job here. He works in Winthrop House dining hall and is carrying on an active, secretive organizing campaign aimed at building a strong position for the negotiations.

Balsam won't say exactly what he's up to, but he sponsors occasional workers' meetings and says he is "organizing against Harvard, not Stefani" because the University's labor relations policies are "paternalistic" and the workers need better wages and benefits. He says he hops for a "substantial wage increase" this spring, but will not give any specific details about his demands or organizing strategy.

Sources close to the union say Balsam's organizing drive is just getting off the ground but that he is tentatively aiming the campaign toward a wage increase well over 10 per cent and toward disciplining of some troublesome managers. Balsam is at the moment staying with the Cooks, but within the union he could turn out to be the kind of pivotal figure that Stefani was in the thirties.

So far Balsam has stayed on good terms with University officials, but Holcombe's relationship with Harvard has been one of ever-increasing bitterness that sometimes erupts into hostile confrontation.