Abstract: We show that any object with consensus number P in Herlihy's wait-free hierarchy is universal in a hard real-time system consisting of any number of tasks on P processors. An important special case of this result is that, for hard real-time applications on uniprocessors, reads and writes are universal. Thus, Herlihy's hierarchy collapses for such applications. We also show that, by exploiting timing information already required for real-time scheduling analysis, reads and writes can be made universal for real-time applications on multiprocessors.