Five years after the formation of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, union members are still mired in...

Five years ago this week, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers was forged from demands for more respect, money and power for Harvard's large but often unrecognized support staff.

The union, now 3,500 members strong, instigated a long-term, on-and-off battle with the University in the courtroom and over the negotiating table, culminating in a collective bargaining agreement ratified June 29, 1989.

One of the union's most vocal rallying calls has been, and continues to be, greater employee empowerment. To this end, the 1989 pact's first article established problem-solving "joint councils" of union members and managers across the University.

Today, the University has almost 40 joint councils, and with a celebration of the union's fifth anniversary this week and the renewed support for joint councils in the second union contract approved January 7 this year, it might seem that "employee empowerment" is working.

Despite some concrete achievements, however, the joint councils have a mandate more for discussion than for action, management is often still distant from workers and union members agree that not enough workers feel they are a part of the joint councils.

On February 13, 1989, a union-management team issued a preliminary "Understanding" that included an emphasis on the importance of joint communication and problem-solving between managers and union members.

With this goal in mind, the two sides agreed on the formation of joint councils, outlined in Article I of the collective bargaining agreement and reaffirmed in the new agreement negotiated last fall.

"The Council is intended to be a forum for the discussion of all workplace matters which have a significant impact on staff," reads the agreement. "Such discussions may include an evaluation of current policies affecting staff as well as consideration of proposed changes in policies or in work force arrangement affecting staff."

Lamont University Professor Emeritus John T. Dunlop, Harvard's chief negotiator for the first agreement, says he is personally in favor of greater employee participation in management decisions. Moreover, he says that the joint council structure is well-suited to the varied, spread-out organization of the University.

"I think that it is particularly appropriate in a highly decentralized university," he says, citing the different priorities and rules in each of Harvard's largely autonomous units. "The alternate approach to a joint council is to have very much more-detailed rules in the master agreement."

Dunlop, who was recently appointed by President Clinton as the head of a national commission on worker-manager relations in the United States, argues that the joint councils help ensure a more productive, efficient work-place.

Bill Jaeger, director of the union of clerical and technical workers (HUCTW), agrees with Dunlop. "There's a trend among academics and scholars who write about management--everyone's writing about the flattening of hierarchy and more employee involvement," he says. "Ideas like that are flying around all the time. Bill Clinton's election...started a whole new wave."

Jointness in management, say Jaeger and Dunlop, have been a frequent topic of labor-related articles during the past few years. A 1992 book by economics professors Barry Bluestone and Irving Bluestone, Negotiating the Future, claims that greater inclusion of employees in management is necessary for the economy to operate as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

"The traditional work organization [is] a workplace that exhibits the self-defeating mindset that the individual worker is no more than an adjunct to the company," the book argues, "and that the natural management between management and labor must be hierarchical and adversarial."