NEGOTIATING THE FUTURE

As workers and activists organized protest after protest outside of the Holyoke Center, through Harvard Yard and around Mass. Hall this year, leaders at MTC and HUCTW stayed indoors, negotiating for better wages and work security, respectively.

According to Jaeger, the new contracts would serve as the backdrop to the University administration’s new spending philosophy, clearer now that plans for the expansion of Allston and the sciences have further solidified.

“In some ways, the new administration hasn’t fully defined its approach or its personality yet,” Jaeger said.

The recently completed HUCTW contract, which will come before the membership in a June 17 vote, would establish a centralized office responsible for enforcing the existing job-security rules. These regulations mandate that the University give preference to laid-off employees when filling new job openings. According to the union’s leadership, the contract also guarantees workers steady wage increases over the next three years, which would accumulate approximately to a 12-percent hike by the end of fiscal year 2007.

Although some critics, citing a four-month delay in the first-year wage increase, have questioned the union’s math in calculating the spoils of the new contract, Jaeger said the uncharacteristically large raise percentage is reflective of the University’s attitude toward its workforce.

Echoing the principal philosophy behind the Living Wage Campaign, an initiative of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) which culminated with a 2001 Mass. Hall sit-in, Jaeger emphasized the importance of the University’s labor force in ensuring Harvard’s continuing success in academics and research.

He said, the Union has had to remind University officials repeatedly about the importance of hiring in-house workers before outsourcing jobs to contracting companies.

“We’re always trying to convince these managers that ‘how can I do it cheapest’ is not the only question,” he said. “When Harvard’s hiring professors, they’re not going for the cheapest ones, and it wouldn’t be as great a university if people working the staff jobs were the cheapest ones.”

According to University Director of Labor Relations Bill Murphy, Harvard has responded positively to the union’s reasoning.

“You want to keep the best and the brightest, and you have to pay people to do that,” he said.

Putting a stop to outsourcing was one of the main demands of the Living Wage Campaign. Although University President Lawrence H. Summers made no unilateral promises in its aftermath, the popularly termed Katz Committee, formed in response to the sit-in, used remarkably strong language against the practice in its report to the president.

The report blamed the use of outside contractors for driving down wages on campus, stating that “outsourcing should not be used to lower wages and weaken the unions representing Harvard’s employees.” Their recommendations included a “parity policy” requiring contractors to pay wages and benefits that are at least equal to those paid to comparably employed unionized Harvard workers.

LEGACY OF THE LIVING WAGE

Ideally, the “parity policy” would have protected in-house workers from cheap subcontracted labor, but according to labor activists, the University has flipped the idea on its head, using the policy as a way to drive down union wages.