It’s been just under two weeks since the Maintenance Trade Council (MTC) rejected a new work contract, leaving Harvard about 13 days to redraw its terms before hundreds of unionized workers can shelve their tools, terminate their existing contracts and announce a strike.

When a majority of the MTC’s voting membership turned down the University’s contract proposal on May 24, a year of tumultuous labor relations and widespread worker dissatisfaction came to a violent, angry conclusion.

“People were standing up screaming,” said one worker who voted for the strike authorization and against the contract.

The worker, an electrician who asked to remain anonymous, said that although the MTC—a coalition of five smaller campus unions—has the only contract at Harvard with an absolute “no layoffs” clause, the 1.5-percent first-year wage increase being offered by the University is too low in light of the wages paid to University higher-ups.

“Can you believe it?” the worker said. “Here they are telling us, ‘We’re broke, we have no money,’ but there was plenty of money to go around for the University’s upper management.”

Still, an actual strike seems unlikely, according to Joe Borelli, an employee with Yard maintenance.

“We’d lose all our leverage,” he said. The valuable “no layoffs” clause, negotiated many years ago, would disappear immediately and workers would face the threat of outsourcing companies, Borelli said.

“They would love to get that out. Every year, that’s the first thing they ask for,” he said, adding that a higher wage increase—3 percent for the first year—is all he wants.

QUESTIONING THE BOTTOM LINE

According to Merry Touborg, a spokesperson for the Office of Human Resources, over 200 Harvard employees have been laid off since last June.

The layoffs this year came as a response to budget troubles cited by Harvard. Managers in all University departments were presented with budgetary goals from the central administration and instructed to make the necessary reductions to meet the bottom line. Some cut services, while others laid off workers and cut positions. Some had to do both—the Harvard College Library, facing a projected $2.3-million deficit, was forced to close both Hilles and Kummel Libraries and lay off about 14 workers.

But widely publicized eight-figure salaries paid to Harvard’s top endowment managers have raised doubts about claims of budget troubles, undermining an intense ongoing initiative to cut costs at every level of operation.

“Our view would be that in general, the financial resources are not severely constrained, or they’re constrained only in relation to some of those years in the ’90s when the available revenue increased by as much as 20 or 30 percent per year,” said Bill Jaeger, director of the 4,800-member Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). “Departments were finding themselves with millions and millions of dollars to budget, and no one had to say ‘no’ to anything. It’s a little bit more real-world around here now, and all the schools and departments are finding ways to deal with that.”

Activist groups such as the No Layoffs Campaign have staged rallies and repeatedly pointed to the University’s $19.3-billion endowment as proof that the layoffs were unnecessary. HUCTW leaders were more sympathetic toward the administration, taking steps to adjust to changing financial priorities and restrictions on the endowment.

“People say the Harvard endowment is big, and as successful as it is, they could afford to give us all a 10-percent raise,” Jaeger said. “I’d go one further—they could actually afford to buy us each a yacht, but it’s not clear that that would be fair, or that that would be the right thing to do with the University’s resources.”

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.

Protesters have accused the University of presenting union leaders with the choice of either settling for lower wages or forfeiting jobs to outside companies. PSLM member Daniel B. Weissman ’05 called the parity policy a “minor cosmetic change.”

“They’re using the threat of outsourcing as a point of negotiation with the unions,” he said. “They were careful to avoid very concrete statements, which allowed them to weasel around things. What do they start doing after we leave? They start busting the guards union, just getting rid of all the unionized workers.”

By last fall, Harvard’s in-house security force had dwindled from a peak of 122 in the late 1980s to a mere 17. By early spring, the number of unionized security guards fell to seven, and on June 30, when they will trade in their Harvard uniforms for company garb from Allied Security, their breed will be completely extinct.

That leaves just under 80 members in the Harvard University Security, Parking and Museum Guards’ Union (HUSPMGU), and their contract will run out in 2006.

Not all of Harvard’s unions have been as successful as HUCTW in preparing for future budget cuts. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 615, which represents Harvard’s 800 custodians, found itself staging regular protests this year in conjunction with the PSLM, demanding more full-time jobs and better wages for its members.

According to the current contract, the University must put forth its “best effort” to transform 60 percent of custodial jobs into full-time positions by November 2005, when negotiations with the union will begin anew.

“We don’t even see any evidence that [the University] is trying to reach the 60 percent mark,” said SEIU rally organizer Aaron Bartley at a February protest. “People who have worked four hours a day for 15 years are not given real jobs.”

The SEIU had been campaigning for more full-time positions since the previous winter, demanding that the seniority of long standing part-time employees be taken into account when job openings arise. As of last February, union representatives were meeting regularly with University officials to discuss the subject of seniority, but if the strong SEIU presence at a recent May Day labor rally in Harvard Yard is any indication, the conflict remains unresolved.

HUMAN RESOURCES STEPS UP

A new position at Mass. Hall may force some progress, as current human resources head Polly Price leaves her post this summer and makes way for a new and more prominent position—a vice president of human resources who will report directly to Summers.

Jaeger said the elevation of human resources to the same level of prominence as finance, alumni affairs and administration is an opportunity for a promising new era of labor relations at Harvard.

Jaeger, who sits on the search committee in charge of choosing candidates for the position, said that his union is paying close attention to the type of person who gets hired, as their personal approach to management will define the direction of the University’s labor relations.

“There’s different kinds of philosophies out there about managing people,” Jaeger said. “Everybody in the human resources world said that they’re interested in training, but if you look at people’s records, some of them are much more focused on controlling costs, and finding ways to operate more efficiently with fewer people.”

While Human Resources is growing in prominence and HUCTW looks ahead optimistically, the MTC is threatening to strike and HUSPMGU is losing the last of its security guards to outsourcing. Spending priorities at the top of the command post continue to change, and labor at Harvard finds itself at a critical juncture as the academic, and perhaps more importantly, fiscal year comes to a close. The University’s expansion into Allston stands to introduce thousands of new jobs in the long run while immediately threatening the security of existing workers.

With more cutbacks and frugality to come, Harvard workers and their union leaders are bracing themselves for uncertain times.

“It’s like an equation,” said Leon Welch, a unionized purchasing assistant with University Health Services. “People are working in fear of what they see. If there’s a bunch of dominoes starting to fall up at the top, it’ll be your turn after a while.”

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.