"Your plans are going to require the enthusiastic participation of the workers. I hope you are not going to cram your proposals down the throats of your tenants the way you are doing with us."

A long period of cooperation between the Cambridge Housing Authority (CHA) and its Administrative, Clerical, and Technical employees seem to have come to an end. The 67 workers and their union, Teamsters Local 122, say that new contract proposals being put forward by the Authority "would alter every aspect of work life."

Negotiations started in March 2005. On June 14, CHA’s new Executive Director, Greg Russ, presented the Union with a 36-page contract proposal that would revise 19 of 23 existing Articles and seeks to add 3 more. "Almost a complete rewrite," says Cannon. The Union’s 8-page proposal would have revised only 8 articles.

Since then, Cannon and John Murphy, the Local’s Secretary Treasurer, have faced the CHA management team across the table a dozen more times. They are just now getting to the end of the CHA’s long document.

Cannon says, "We’re put in the position of asking them to explain everything and why it’s necessary." It seems to him that the CHA negotiators themselves "don’t have a complete handle on what they’re proposing. They repeatedly don’t have an answer—or they choose not to answer what it is that drives each proposal."

Among those proposals

• A new pay structure that eliminates negotiated salaries and links pay to performance. That means would leave management free—within broad limits—to raise or lower any worker’s pay on an individual basis.

• Management rights to reassign shifts, to force overtime, and to change both hours and days of work.

• Most ominous perhaps, CHA would have the unlimited right to contract out work. Clerical work could potentially be sent over the internet, to be done in other countries or even in prisons.

"It looks like it is going to be a difficult struggle," wrote Cannon in December. "For the twenty five years that the local has represented these employees, there was never hint of problems that would justify changes of this magnitude."