Harvard Will Pay Millions In Settlement

Harvard University has agreed to pay millions of dollars in back pay and benefits to 300 to 500 employees who were misclassified as casual workers.

The university also will offer a significant number of workers from the group both full-time employment and monetary compensation.

The agreement, announced Tuesday by Harvard and the 3,600-member Harvard Union of Clerical & Technical Workers, comes two months after the university publicly acknowledged misclassifying the workers, despite a union contract requiring that after three months on the job casual employees must be reclassified as full-time. That contract, as well as a longstanding university policy, defines a casual employee as anyone who works less than 17.5 hours a week.

Anne Taylor, general counsel and vice president of Harvard, said the total payout would be “in the millions, but exactly how much no one knows at this time.”