University officials say they are attempting to protect employees from unions that, according to administrators, do not always represent the employees' interests. "The university position is to provide the other side of the story. There is nothing that a union will gain for its employees," says Pete Tufford, director of employee relations at Cornell University.

But workers disagree. "The administration tried to scare people and make them nervous. They say to the workers: `We're one big happy family. Let's give it some time.' They make the union look like outsiders," says Joan Bailey, a United Auto Workers organizer who helped establish the B.U. union when she was a worker there.

While union leaders may disagree with the administration's arguments, they use similar techniques to draw support. Employees meet one-on-one with their colleagues to present the union arguments for increased influence to gain better wages and benefits and more equitable review processes. And the unions send letters to warn workers of the arguments management may use and to assure them that a union does not necessarily mean increased animosity between the employed and the employers.

In the efforts to block unionization, university administrators have sometimes filed complaints with the courts against the unions.

In the early 1980s, Columbia pressed litigation against its union before it was elected as the official bargaining unit with the university. Columbia administrators called upon the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which certifies union elections, to redefine the union's constituency, according to union officials. The university claimed that lowranking administrators should be defined as support staff and consequently union members. But the NLRB rejected the proposal, which workers said would have allowed for too much administrative influence in the union.

The appeal to the NLRB and other delays resulted in a lapse of four years between when the union distributed cards and when the first contract was signed, in 1985.

"The university attempted to use long legal delays knowing that unions want to solve problems quickly," says Maida Rosenstein, an organizer for Columbia's union District 65 and a former employee there. "Delays are discouraging. There's a danger that the union's momentum will drop."

At Stanford in 1984, 10 years after the United Stanford Workers (USW) was established as the official union for technical and maintenance workers, the administration refused to recognize the union when it became affiliated with a national labor organization.

Stanford administrators brought the case before the NLRB, which rejected the administrators' claims and instead charged the university with unfair labor practices. In the end, the USW won a confidence vote, the NLRB dropped the charges, and the university resumed recognition of the union.

United We Stand

Despite university efforts to block unionization, clerical and technical workers have over the past 15 years often succeeded in establishing locals.

Workers at Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, B.U., Yale, and Princeton have unionized partially. Organizers at Princeton and the B.U. Medical Area are beginning to form white-collar unions, but their counterparts at Brown and Dartmouth remain largely unorganized. District 65, a national union dominated by university locals to which the B.U. and Columbia unions belong, is currently investigating the possibility of heading union drives at area schools, including Simmons, Northeastern and Suffolk.

But union organizers at several schools say they continue to meet resistance when they meet administrators at the bargaining table. They add that, as a result, even long-established unions have not always gained contracts competitive with those of neighboring corporations. But however inconsistent unions have been in gaining pay increases and improved benefits, union officers point to clarified job descriptions and just grievance procedures as major and consistent union successes.

"I don't know if they would've got whatever they got without the threat the union poses, but I think anything is effective. Unionization itself is effective, just so people know who they are," says B.U. Professor Freda Rebevsky, who heads a non-bargaining faculty association there.

At Stanford, USW officials say a workers' strike had the long-term effect of strengthening the union's bargaining position. In 1982, a four-week walkout by the 1300 maintenance, crafts and technical workers over a contract dispute had little impact on the terms of the settlement. Three years later, however, the union gained a 7.5 percent pay increase for the first year and increases of approximately four percent for the next two, a union spokeswoman says.