Under the Tuition Assistance Program, the 2001 contract guaranteed employees with at least one year of service the opportunity to take up to two Harvard courses per term.
The program also required the University to reimburse staff members for courses taken at other institutions, as long as the total cost was under $5,250 per calendar year.
The negotiations leading up to that contract resulted in the creation of the Harvard Academy of Workforce Education, which would oversee job training and skill development programs at the University.
According to Jaeger and Morani, the current negotiations may strengthen those provisions, granting employees even more educational opportunities within the University and elsewhere.
“There’s a lot of young people in the work force, and lot of people going back to school,” Morani said.
In addition, the question of housing assistance, which would ease the burden of high Cambridge rent, was not mentioned in the previous contract, although it was broached during the last round of negotiations.
Union representatives would not comment on the specifics of the housing proposal, but last month’s flyer referred to the introduction of “innovative programs to help staff with the difficulties of the housing market in the Boston area.”
“I pay almost half of my take home for my rent, because I’m living in Cambridge,” said Marcia Deihl, a librarian at Harvard for 20 years. “That’s not Harvard’s fault. [Housing] would be my dream issue in a contract.”
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
As the negotiating team hammers out the final points of the upcoming contract, the details of the new programs remain under wraps due to a confidentiality agreement with the University.
Some members of the union object to the closed nature of the negotiations, demanding a more active role for regular union members.
“There isn’t much sharing of info with membership,” Carens said. “That’s not a strong effective strategy to win a good contract. You have to try to reach out to all the rank-and-file members, and the way to do that is to make them feel like they can influence the way negotiations happen.”
But Morani said that the union’s methods of negotiation have worked for them so far, citing the 150 percent increase in wages HUCTW members have seen since the union’s foundation 15 years ago.
The “militant” nature of the No Layoffs Campaign is an ineffective strategy in dealing with an entity as big as the University, Morani said.
“We’re not combative in that sense because we feel that we don’t work best in that way…That’s not our way of working, and I don’t know how much pressure it places on the University to change their approach. Our approach has worked very well in the University to get us all the things we have.”
If negotiations are completed on schedule, the new contract will go into effect on July 1, at the start of Fiscal Year 2005.
—Staff writer May Habib can be reached at habib@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.