On May 15, 2008, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) held its twentieth birthday celebration at the Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard. I was next door at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library, sleepily perusing my next fat folder of government documents. As the laughter and singing wafted its way across the quad, the choice of whether to stay or go was clear. I followed the trail of balloons to the theater, grabbed my complimentary union tote bag, smiled at all the lovingly crafted refreshments that awaited the revelers, and squeezed into a tiny space in the front as the lights went down. Long familiar with the upbeat and bold spirit of the union, I was still caught off guard when the lights came back up. Seated a few feet from me on the stage was a 1940s femme fatale who began to belt out “A Union Is a Girl's Best Friend.”

And the program only got better. Senator Edward Kennedy, Representative Barney Frank, Harvard president Drew Faust, and a host of other union allies—and adversaries—sent birthday greetings. Three former HUCTW presidents offered comments profoundly funny and wise. The Pipets, the union's singing group, moved us spontaneously to our feet with their gospel, pop, and Broadway show tunes. Then we settled back for the finale: a video of the union's long struggle for recognition and a keynote by Kris Rondeau, the union's lead organizer and negotiator.

In lieu of a traditional conference report, ILWCH brings you a set of documents from the celebration. In the pages that follow, we reproduce photos from HUCTW's history, the union's logo with its signature slogans, song lyrics written by the Pipets to four of their frequently performed tunes, and Rondeau's keynote address, “We Are All Learners.”

HUCTW has much to offer scholars and activists in search of ways of reinventing a labor movement for the majority. Its history is also a reminder that the story of US labor in the 1970s and 1980s is not simply one of decline. A new service unionism was emerging, energized by the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹ It all began in 1972, when a small group of research technicians at Harvard's medical school complex started asking questions about their salaries. It took sixteen long years of organizing to prevail against Harvard and win the right to union representation for 3,000 clerical and technical workers. The victory was the largest of its kind in a private university. By 2008, twenty years later, HUCTW and its sister locals had added 20,000 new workers, including hospital, social service, and other employees. The union's accomplishments at the Harvard bargaining table are legendary: salary increases of 172 percent from 1989 to 2008; equity for long-term “casual” workers and part-timers; domestic partner health care; paid parental leave; flexible scheduling; equal voice with management in problem-solving and work redesign.Footnote ² More recently, many of these same benefits have been extended to other workplaces, including notable successes in improving the lives of patients and staff at University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center, in part by giving more autonomy and power to the lowest-paid workers, including orderlies and nurses aides.Footnote ³

February 1988 rally of pro-union Harvard workers at Old Cambridge Baptist Church. Credit: Marilyn Humphries

But what makes HUCTW so noteworthy is not just its bargaining strength and what it has accomplished for its members. The organization offers a vision of unionism that has the potential to improve all of our lives. In 1911, Rose Schneiderman, a US garment-union leader and later influential friend and advisor to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, captured worker desires for a new kind of unionism. “The woman worker wants bread,” she said, “but she wants roses too.”Footnote ⁴ The men and women of HUCTW are carrying forward the search for bread and roses today. As Rondeau recalls in her twentieth-anniversary keynote, “We knew why we had organized Harvard: to balance power, to beat poverty, to help build a middle class in service-sector America.” HUCTW was about worker power, higher wages, and economic security—what Rondeau in an interview with geographer Lydia Savage has called “standard-of-living issues.”Footnote ⁵

Yet as Rondeau also underscores in her keynote, there was more. HUCTW was about roses: making community, creativity, and learning possible at work and strengthening families and communities outside of work. “New unions are about changing how it feels to come to work, not just how big a paycheck is,” observed Rondeau and coauthor Janna Malamud Smith, a member of the Union of Social Workers, in a recent Boston Globe column.Footnote ⁶ How has HUCTW achieved its goals? Its organizers are clear: Greater worker power cannot be willed from above; it flows from the bonds of community and members' shared beliefs that everyone is a learner and a leader and that everyone deserves to be treated with kindness, dignity, and respect.Footnote ⁷

Recent debates over union revitalization have tended to devolve into an either/or formulation of “adversarial unionism” versus “employer partnerships.”Footnote ⁸ HUCTW's approach helps move us beyond these unhelpful dichotomies. They see both strategies as necessary, and they have employed both effectively. In their campaign for part-time equity, for example, they relied on traditional union tactics to put direct pressure on management. At other moments, the union has eschewed an anti-boss message and chosen either to ignore management or to challenge it to become a partner in advancing the union's goals.Footnote ⁹

The HUCTW model has provoked many studies and much discussion.Footnote ¹⁰ We hope this short conference report and set of documents will stimulate more.

A union banner from the early 1980s, invented in response to a skeptical worker who wanted three good reasons to join the union. The day after hundreds of union activists wore buttons with this slogan, Harvard announced a dental plan for employees.