Collier has worked at Widener Library for 13 years, paying bills for books the library buys. She's worked at Harvard for 14 years.

She makes $25,000 a year.

It's making ends meet, however, that can be difficult. "It's extremely stressful at times," Collier says. She finds it most trying to take care of her elderly parents.

"I do not ever want to be in the position that my parents are in. My parents haven't got anything. They've got nothing," Collier says.

Collier talks of having trouble finding $90 to pay to fix her father's wheelchair. And she says Medicaid doesn't cover things like false teeth.

With a raise, Collier said, "you can look forward to a few extra dollars so you don't have to worry about that." She wants to be able to help out her unemployed son-in-law and to pay for dance lessons for her grandchildren.

With health care costs pressing, Collier has little money left over for luxuries. "I'm 61 years old and I've never been on a cruise," she says.

Rudenstine and his management team can make a difference in whether Collier's grandchildren get those dance lessons, whether Dobbie's daughter gets new clothes and whether Reid gets a vacation, the workers say.

They say that when they appeared before the management negotiating team, most of the administrators present seemed to be listening carefully.

An exception, Collier says, was Medical School Executive Dean for Administration David M. Bray, who "was quite rude, looking at the ceiling, cleaning his glasses."

In an interview over the summer, Bray said he takes the negotiations seriously and is not responsible for how others interpret his body language.

Reid says she is not terribly optimistic about her voice getting through to administrators making $100,000 a year or more. "Based on the way that they live and based on what their salaries probably were, they were totally out of touch," she says.

But Dobbie speaks with an urgency that suggests that an improved understanding is not only possible but important. "We are real people, we're intelligent, educated people," she says. "We just