The employees say Fischer largely ignored their complaints when their 30 minute break was cut in half. Two employees said that after they approached Fischer in confidence, Skane asked them about the specifics of those complaints. They say Fischer violated their trust. Fischer has refused to comment.

In addition, the employees only saw changes in lab packaging--which included the use of occasionally leaky brown paper bags to handle blood and semen specimens--after OSHA threatened to investigate.

* Jean S. Thong, an employee in the manager's office at the Medical School's Vanderbilt Hall, says she was laid off earlier this year even though assistant director of Medical School human resources Elaine Pridham knew Thong's boss had mistreated her.

A year's worth of electronic mail messages from Vanderbilt Hall show that Pridham had intimate knowledge of arguments and disagreements between Thong and her boss, Yvonne Geeve. Thong says her lay-off was unusual because another employee in the department has less seniority than she does.

There are no rules saying that seniority should determine who is laid off and who is not. Workers say Thong was the hardest-working employee in the small office.

Pridham, at one point in the electronic mail, tells Thong to take a vacation so that she will be away while Pridham works with Geeve on her management skills. Pridham refused to comment.

* Darryl Hicks, a cook in the College's largest dining hall, says human resources officials have long ignored complains from him and other workers about how they are treated on the job.

And when a student group, the Harvard-Radcliffe Labor Alliance, met with Patrick to discuss the Hicks case, the director was unnecessarily dismissive, according to students.

Hicks has a long disciplinary record, but he says that his bosses, in concert with human resources, have worked to build up his record in hopes of firing him, which they did this spring. The firing came shortly after he filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Patrick says decentralization should quell complaints by allowing for more personal, local solutions to labor-management tensions. She says she doesn't see any more complaints now than she did a year ago, before the decentralization of human resources began in earnest.

But she also acknowledges that there are problems in the Office of Labor Relations, which is part of the central Office of Human Resources. The labor relations office has been without a director since Vivienne Rubeski, who was admired by workers for her honesty, died last year.

"They are grossly understaffed," says Patrick. "With the loss of the director of labor relations, we lost a lot of capacity."

Union officials say Patrick has dragged her feet in picking a replacement for Rubeski, while the director says she had to wait for the end of contract negotiations with the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers before she had could devote her full attention to the choice.

But workers say the absence of a leader has left much of the responsibility for labor relations with associate director Carolyn R. Young '76, who is widely despised by union representatives for being too inflexible. In an interview with The Crimson this spring, Young said she could not remember ever reversing the termination of an employee that was appealed to her.

"Carolyn's a great one for quoting legalities, although she doesn't want to recognize the rights of union members," says Hirtle, the Office of University Publisher worker and shop steward. "She does her job very well, if her job is to maintain management at all costs."