But Conroy said the university has negotiated fairly.

“We weren’t going to start from an artificially low number just to say we moved it up,” he said. “They started artificially high...if you start artificially high, it’s not that relevant that you’ve moved.”

But Laura Smith, president of Local 34, said there are “no good contract offers on the table from Yale.”

This week’s strike comes nine months after Yale dismissed John R. Stepp, a consultant from Restructuring Associates Inc. (RAI) agreed upon by both parties and hired by the university to facilitate negotiations.

RAI issued a report on January 14, 2002, just a month before negotiations began, which made three recommendations: union organizing and university growth must be addressed, the university must change its management style and the parties must use a non-traditional negotiating process to address those issues.

The resulting procedure was “interest-based negotiating,” which asks the parties to identify its key issues rather than staking out positions in an attempt to find common ground. RAI trained negotiation teams from both the university and unions in the process.

Though university officials say Stepp was dismissed by late last May after completing his work, union leaders contend that he was unilaterally dismissed.

Stepp could not be reached for comment yesterday.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.