Word: cooped
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When most people join the Harvard Cooperative Society, they get a little red or grey plastic card. But Stephen Waters '85 will get an engraved Harvard chair, a new suit, and--just maybe--a date with Miss U.S.A. 1982. Waters is the Coop's 100,000 member and will receive his gifts today, as the Coop celebrates its 100th anniversary...
...Coop's second red-letter event this week calls to mind other questionable policies, these ones concerning Coop employees. Monday, the National Labor Relations Board heard the Coop defend itself against the board's charges that Coop management illegally interfered with an unsuccessful unionization drive last year--that it employed a variety of union-busting techniques to quash a union that sought to improve wages and working conditions. Whether or not those allegations are accurate, they suggest more fundamental labor problems...
...transient character of Harvard Square labor has allowed the Coop to pay its workers often shockingly low wages, scarcely above the minimum wage for some full-time stockboys and clerks. The plight of older Coop workers is often worse. Forced to cope with high inflation, they can find little comfort in the Coop's low wages. Employees have cited other labor problems: oppressive monitoring, inconsiderate assignment of tasks, and biased promotion procedures...
...time when Coop rebates are running close to 10 percent--and when additional profits are being funneled into expansion--maintaining low wages and benefits seems particularly reprehensible. The Coop--led by its student directors--should try to improve wages and benefits and institute a regular policy of rechanneling half of member rebates back into employee benefits, where they will do far more good...
...Coop management, then, the store's 100th anniversary should be occasion not for placid celebration--for profits alone are nothing to celebrate--but instead for looking both back at the Coop's past and ahead to its future. The past should remind them of the forgotten ideals of the retail cooperative--fair prices, compassionate treatment of workers, and cooperation with its membership. The future, we hope, will allow the Coop to realize those ideals better than it has in recent years...