While nobody knows for sure how much the deal will cost, Jaeger says this is money the University should be spending.

"This is going to cost them a little money, but, frankly, money that they can spare," he said.

For University and union officials, the task of figuring out the exact numbers still lies ahead.

"Until we go through this line by line, we won't know. It really means a lot of people are going to have spend a lots of weekends at the office," Taylor says.

As far as the union is concerned, it felt it held the upper hand in negotiations from a legal and moral standpoint.

"They had a lot of public relations and legal vulnerabilities and they were smart to deal with it," Jaeger says.

The union in the past has been very vocal about its concerns, expressing them through pickets of Mass. Hall and even meeting President Rudenstine at the airport after he returned from a vacation.

And through the course of investigating how other institutions were dealing with the contingent workforce, Taylor came across a case where the Department of Labor had gone after Time Warner for similar abuses of part-time employees.