The tents and chanting are gone. The formal committee meetings are over. The report has, for the most part, been accepted. Now, the burden of implementing the report of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies (HCECP) has fallen to the University’s 11 schools.

The schools are finding that the impact of the report is anything but clear—the only thing they know for sure is that it will cost their schools a lot more in benefits and wages.

Complicating the situation for the schools is that their proposed budgets are due to the University administration next month, long before the true cost of the HCECP report has been totalled.

“By March, we’ll have to have a perspective on what this means,” says J. Bonnie Newman, executive dean of the Kennedy School of Government and also a member of the HCECP committee.

A Guessing Game

Union negotiations with custodial workers have been ongoing for the last four weeks, and after their conclusion the University will reopen discussion with representatives of dining services and security workers.

The goal, as recommended by the HCECP, is to set wages between $10.83 and $11.30 for the school’s 1,000 lowest-paid employees.

Under the current timetable, Harvard hopes to complete union negotiations by May and to develop a parity wage plan—to ensure outsourced workers receive similar pay and benefits to comparable in-house workers—by March 31.

The University’s Human Resources Office (HRO) is conducting the negotiations, which will then apply to all schools. But while the central administration officials are in regular contact with the schools and are aware of the budget deadlines, they cannot speed the process, says David A. Jones, who directs the HRO’s Office of Labor and Employee Relations and is in charge of union negotiations.

“They’re waiting for us,” he says. “But this is collective bargaining, and the parties don’t have to agree.”

As a result of the uncertainty, schools can only estimate the costs of the HCECP report.

“As to how much [the implementation will cost], it’s hard to say,” says Harvard Law School Assistant Dean and Chief Financial Officer Paul Warren Upson. “We don’t have much control. In the next month, we’re going to have to make guesses to put these numbers in the budget.”

The committee estimated in its Dec. 19 report that overall costs for the University would be between $2.4 and $3.7 million a year. But in a Jan. 31 interview, University President Lawrence H. Summers said the committee’s estimate was “somewhat” low.

For some schools, estimating has been relatively easy. Schools with fewer employees, like the Graduate School of Education, have a greater ability to predict costs.

The school has a total of about 16 contract employees and expects the wage proposals to cost about $28,000 next year—a number Director of Fiscal and Administrative Services Robert Gewecke says was relatively insignificant in light of the school’s $20 million budget.