The notion that all employees are pursuing a common goal is one that Vassia Joannidi, an organizer for District 65, is trying to discredit. Almost more important to the organizing drive than the gripes with pay-scales and promotion opportunities are the organizers' grievances about less tangible elements of the labor-management relationship. These elements include the common-goal myth and Harvard's paternalism.

Joannidi, who works in accounts Also because of these concerns, when a reporter asked Gibson if he could spend two days interviewing workers at their posts, Gibson suggested that the interviews be conducted in the snack room, so that no working time would be lost. payable on the third floor, uses the term "paternalism" when she talks about Harvard management's claims to represent the interests of the workers. This claim is unfounded, she says, as long as workers are cut out of decision processes. "When you're doing your job, certain responsibilities are taken away from you," she says. "And it's all done with a claim that this is a nonprofit organization, an academic organization with higher aims, that we're all part of this community. Well, we're not part of this community."

After nearly two years of organizing District 65 does not have enough signatures to ask for a National Labor Relations Board election, although Joannidi says its efforts have been relatively successful on the third floor of Holyoke Center. A high turnover rate among younger employees has been particularly nettling to the union, and Joannidi concedes that the union will have to destroy what she says are the "myths" workers hold about a closed shop: time clocks, stricter relationships. But, she adds, "you don't invent reasons for people to join the union--the reasons are there and they're good ones." The process of convincing employees to sign up is, by Joannidi's description, an almost Marxist discovery of alienated self: "The turning point is when, from frustration from your work, you transform this feeling into a more positive feeling of, 'when we get together, we don't need to compete or mistrust each other."'

What the union is up against is the satisfied attitude of workers like Donna Estella who identify their own futures with Harvard's. Older employees all say that they would never join a union and suggest that if employees are dissatisfied they should leave. A couple of older workers boast that they are from "the old school." "The whole attitude of the workers has changed," says one. "It's out of control. We're of the old school that feels the management should control." Some older workers say they would have a different attitude if they were younger. "Pursuing a career, and being a woman, I'd want it," one woman says. Most older workers believe the young supervisor's concept of a common goal and also accept Gibson's concern that, with unionization, the third floor would lose its "flexibility." "Everything would tend to get frozen," Gibson continues, "everything would be codified in a considerably more detailed way than it is now."

An employee who is a graduate of the College and works in student loans says the "team spirit" in his section is a paternalistic creation, and that it will frustrate the District 65 effort. Because the work is "less regimented than other white-collar work," he says, a team spirit flourishes. Or as Brown-Beasley says, "there's an extraordinary amount of intimacy here. One can hear the name Jerry [Jerrold Gibson] on the lips of many people here."

But Brown-Beasley dismisses the word paternalistic. When he gives white roses to an employee who is "in the dumps," when he kisses "half a dozen women at Christmas," Brown-Beasley insists, he is acting from genuine concern. But he recognizes that there is a difference between management and labor. "The women on whose backs this system has been erected--who carry home five and six hundred a month--are aware that there is a difference, and it would be a lie to say that they don't resent that difference."

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Jerrold Gibson is a very pleasant man whose "pilgrimage" began in the admissions office in the 1960's and took him in 1973 to an open office on the third floor of Holyoke Center as director of the Office of Fiscal Services. Like all other offices in Holyoke Center, his office's windows do not open; some employees say this gives work a sort of hermetic and stuffy feeling. Gibson also has an FM radio that plays softly while he works. So does Brown-Beasley, and he says that all employees on the third floor of Holyoke Center should have the privilege. Music should be "piped in," says Brown-Beasley.

If you tell Vassia Joannidi, the District 65 organizer about this suggestion, she waves her hands vigorously, shaking her head. Harvard employees have "absolutely no input in the every day running of their work," she says, and if management ever pipes in music on the third floor, it will be no different. "They make the decision, they choose the channel, and they play the music," she says.