According to Marie Manna, a former employee at the School of Public Health, the majority of the organizing in advance of the votes involved one-on-one conversations with employees.

During lunch hours, Manna and other staff members went out in teams of two, meeting as many people as possible to discuss why they felt representation was so important.

One challenge that the organizers encountered was that most workers were satisfied with Harvard as an employer and did not understand how someone could elect to join a union but still be satisfied with one’s job.

“[It] was hard for people to reconcile that,” Manna said.

To make the new union’s intentions clear, Congressman Barney E. Frank ’61-’62, who came out in support of HUCTW in March of 1988, created a slogan encapsulating these feelings.

“It’s not anti-Harvard to be pro-union,” the motto read.

“[The campaign] was, ‘Let’s go out and talk to people and hear about what their lives have been like and their work experience, and try to help them to understand why there’s a lot of people who want a union,’” Manna said.

SINGING, NOT STRIKING

The idea that HUCTW’s focus was not on particular grievances, but instead on the broader principle of representation, made the union appealing for Jaeger, who was working at the time as a staff assistant in what is now known as the Davis Center for European Studies.

“There wasn’t anything angry about it,” Jaeger said. “Nobody was shouting, nobody was whining.”

Instead, union organizers took to singing to further their cause within the Harvard community. Staff members formed an a capella group called the Pipettes that sang light-hearted jingles to communicate the workers’ message.

“There was a lot of excitement in our organizing drive about the idea that maybe we could build a determined and powerful organization that could make progress in relentlessly peaceful and community-oriented kind of ways,” Jaeger said.

Part of this effort to engage the community included getting students involved in the push to unionize.

Damon A. Silvers ’86, an undergraduate during the beginning of the movement, went on to work in the union’s office after graduation. According to Silvers, there were several hundred students who were actively involved in supporting the workers, many of whom were recent college graduates themselves.

“There was a lot of kind of natural vicinity between the students and the workers in the technical unit,” Silvers said.