She stressed that no large cuts were expected for anytime in the near future and that the cuts were position-focused, not person-focused.
“These layoffs were not about performance,” Richardson said. “We looked for positions and functions that were less necessary for the new organization.”
The cuts will improve the Institute’s financial situation in the long term, but according to Richardson its budget will still take a hit this year because of Radcliffe’s heavy investment in severance packages for the fired workers.
She also said Radcliffe has done its best to spread out the losses. Equal numbers of unionized and non-unionized workers, as well as equal numbers of junior and senior staff members, were laid off.
Richardson said that almost every worker who had lost his or her job was told of it on July 10 in either a personal meeting or a meeting with several others from his or her department.
Unionized Radcliffe employees belong to the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). Billy Jaeger, a director at HUCTW, said the union had known in advance of the impending layoffs.
“We’ve known for some time that Radcliffe was struggling with its financial situation because our members who work at Radcliffe have told us that,” Jaeger said. “I think it’s been pretty extensively discussed in the Radcliffe community over the last year. So we knew there were some difficult times coming.”
Jaeger said a clause in HUCTW members’ contracts gives them a kind of “superpriority status” in terms of being considered for other jobs at the University they are qualified for and that “there are plenty of open jobs around the University now.”
Still, the effects of such a large elimination are unsettling.
“It’s Radcliffe getting significantly smaller and so at one level that’s sad for a lot of people,” said Jaeger. “And obviously it’s very upsetting for people who are facing the loss of their jobs.”
“It’s hard to do this in an academic community. We are not the corporate world,” Richardson said. “We wanted to do this in the most humane and respectful way possible. We hope we have succeeded.”
—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.