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Sunday, March 4, 2012

3/1 PICKET IN THE SNOW!

Protesters Rally Against Library Layoffs

By Samuel Y. Weinstock, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Published: Friday, March 02, 2012

Chanting slogans such as "layoffs ruin lives and libraries," Harvard Libraries staff and supporters gathered in front of the Holyoke Center on Thursday evening to protest proposed layoffs.

Approximately 50 protesters gathered in front of the Holyoke Center early Thursday evening to rally against layoffs which may result from the Harvard Library’s upcoming reorganization.
“It may be raw out here, but it’s not as raw as the deal Harvard is giving its employees,” Harvard library worker Geoff P. Carens said through a megaphone to the crowd gathered in the wind and snow. “It may be cold out here, but it’s not as cold as Harvard University.”

After a series of chants and a brief musical performance, the group marched into the Yard and circled Massachusetts Hall, University Hall, and finally Widener Library before returning to the Square. The protesters marched down the center of Mass. Ave., slowing traffic for five minutes before disbanding.
On Jan. 19, Harvard University Library Executive Director Helen Shenton announced that “the library workforce will be smaller than it is now,” and that the University was considering voluntary and involuntary options to reduce staff as part of the Library’s reorganization.

Since then, groups such as the Student Labor Action Movement, Occupy Harvard, and the No Layoffs Campaign have held a variety of protest actions against staff reduction, including an occupation of Lamont Library Café last week.

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Photo

Library Protests

On Feb. 13, the University announced a voluntary retirement package for library workers. Two weeks ago, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, which represents library employees, proposed forming “joint councils” with library administrators to discuss the reorganization of the library.

At Thursday’s protest, Rudi E. Batzell, a doctoral student in history, told the protesters about attending a Graduate Student Council open forum earlier in the day with University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76.

Batzell said that while most of the forum was spent answering questions previously submitted online, it seemed to him that the administrators were expecting controversial questions about the library reorganization. According to Batzell, Garber said at the forum that it was possible that all staff reductions would be voluntary, but he refused to say for certain.

“He flew out of there,” Batzell said. “It was pretty disappointing.”

Harvard College library worker and HUCTW member Dawn M. Miller said that she attended the rally to express her concern about losing her job or her coworkers losing theirs. She said that she was hopeful that the councils would be helpful, but that the request for their formation was a “weak response” from the union that “should have happened six months ago.”

“I’ll try to be optimistic,” Miller said.

Francisco J. Maldonado ’14, who attended the rally, pointed to the fact that Harvard has the largest university endowment in the world to say that Harvard should not lay off workers.

Maldonado said he was satisfied with the way the rally turned out. “I think we got a pretty good showing in spite of this weather,” he said.

—Staff writer Samuel Y. Weinstock can be reached at sweinstock@college.harvard.edu.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Cambridge Chronicle on the Rally

Dozens protest Harvard layoffs

Wicked Local staff photo by Kate Flock

A protest rally against recent lay-offs at Harvard University was held on the campus June 25, 2009.

By Jillian Fennimore

Wicked Local Cambridge

Posted Jun 25, 2009 @ 03:36 PM

Cambridge —

After an hour of chanting through a loud speaker and marching through Harvard Yard with a group of sign-holding protesters, Geoff Carens’ voice was hoarse, but his message to Harvard University was clear.

“Watch out,” he said.

Thursday’s protest was just the beginning of public demonstrations from Harvard students, staff, union workers, and members of the No Layoffs Campaign in reaction to Harvard University’s announcement on Tuesday to fire 275 employees due to a projected 30 percent drop in its endowment – now estimated at close to $26 billion.

“This is just the beginning,” said Carens, a member of the No Layoffs Campaign and a union representative, about future efforts to fight cutting the school’s workforce.

A group of about 30 protesters, many representing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, yelled in unison and held signs that read “Harvard has the money,” and “Harvard is more than just students.”

“When Harvard workers are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back,” the rallying group chanted as they moved from Harvard Yard to Mass. Ave.

In a letter to the university, Harvard president Drew Faust said the past year has “created a set of extraordinary financial challenges.”

“Difficult circumstances have called for difficult decisions across the university,” she wrote.

Along with the sizeable staff cuts – representing close to 2 percent of the university’s workforce – about 40 more staff members will be offered positions with reduced work hours.

Marilyn Hausammann, vice president for human resources at Harvard, said the school has already taken cost-saving measures over the past months like limiting discretionary and travel spending, implementing a hiring and salary freeze, along with a voluntary early-retirement program for more than 500 employees.

“Harvard is being run as a corporation,” said AFSCME member Phebe Eskfeldt.

Harvard spokesman Kevin Galvin said in a statement that staff reductions have been spread evenly across the school’s workforce. Among the 275 job cuts, half of the positions are administrative or professional positions and the rest are clerical or technical workers.

“University officials have worked closely with the unions representing workers at Harvard to provide them with relevant information about the financial challenges that the schools and the central administration are facing, and to offer them opportunities to suggest alternatives to layoffs,” he said in an e-mail. “By the time the process is complete, it will have included about 75 impact bargaining sessions over more than four weeks.”

Harvard is Cambridge's top employer with 11,315 workers in the city.

Monday, June 22, 2009

More protest pix from Commencement

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Commencement action in the News - Open Media Boston

Boston Labor Protests New Harvard University Layoffs as Students Walk

by Jesse Kirdahy-Scalia (Staff), Jun-05-09

Cambridge, MA - As Harvard students walked in Thursday's commencement ceremonies, members and spokespersons of local unions, students and concerned community members rallied on the edge of the campus to protest the dozens of recent layoffs and Harvard University's newly announced plans to fire an additional four HUCTW employees from the School of Design. The action was part of the unions' and students' "No Layoffs Campaign," which aims to halt layoffs and reinstate those who have lost their jobs.

View more photos from Thursday's rally.

Among the approximately thirty people who turned out to protest Thursday were members of HUCTW, SEIU Local 615, AFSCME, and students from SLAM. Protesters stood in front of Holyoke Center, across from Harvard University campus, holding signs, chanting, "They say cut back, we say fight back!" and "They say layoffs, we say back off!" and distributing leaflets to passersby.

Geoff Caren, a Union Representative for HUCTW/AFSCME Local 3650 told Open Media Boston that Harvard plans to layoff four HUCTW members working at Harvard's School of Design. This comes after months of recent cuts and layoffs, which have broadly impacted workers, faculty and students:

Over thirty members of SEIU Local 615, which organizes custodians and security officers, have been laid off in recent months
Hundreds of dining hall workers in UNITE HERE have been forced to reapply for their jobs
Overtime has been eliminated for UNITE HERE and HUCTW members, and other workers
Faculty and non-union employees will not receive a raise this year
Shuttle bus services have been cut
Hot breakfasts have been cut in student dining halls

Caren said already there have been between thirty and fifty layoffs, but that it is difficult to know for certain because Harvard does not announce their layoffs. "Rank and file people like me, we just hear about them through word of mouth."

Daniel Brasil Becker, an organizer for SEIU Local 615, told Open Media Boston, "Where we have seen layoffs, it's been 30%-40% of the staff of janitorial workers in any given shift in any given work site. We do believe that this is an initial trial run. Nothing that Harvard said has indicated anything otherwise. And if 30%-40% is applied to the 800 janitorial workers that clean Harvard University, we're looking at hundreds of layoffs." Brasil Becker is concerned such layoffs would result in health hazards. Citing a recent outbreak of H1N1 virus at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Brasil Becker noted the janitorial staff is tasked with providing a clean and healthy environment for the everyone on campus. He added, "For janitorial workers, they themselves suffer from numerous health hazards in the daily work that they do. When, as is the case with several of the workers who have already been impacted by layoffs, the workers who remain are asked to cover the job that three other workers were assigned to prior." Brasil Becker indicated this presents hazards not just for custodial staff, but potentially for others on campus if overstretched workers are unable to complete their duties.

Garbage piled up outside Kirkland House on commencement day.

Caren said that in addition to above-mentioned layoffs and cuts, Harvard uses "classic corporate intimidation" to delay its employees admittance into unions. Dennis Prater, a former Harvard employee who worked at the Radcliffe Quad Library, told Open Media Boston he worked as a temporary worker for more than a year before Harvard finally lay him off. According to Prater, after an initial three month period in the official capacity of a temporary worker, he was hired as a "light" worker—less than half time—then rehired through another temp agency.

Prater said he wanted to join the union as soon as he was able, but "at that point, I was out of money. I had been less than half time for a few months, out of money. I said, 'Ok, well I wanna be in the union, but I have to take this temp job.'" According to Prater, his supervisor earnestly wanted to find a union job for him but that as the recession deepened, he was told Harvard would need to let him go. "My impression was that there were some higher up things happening, where they didn't want to give the library for a union worker. Of course the administration didn't want to higher a union worker and have to pay more to give someone benefits and stuff. Look at what they're doing to the workers now. They use every excuse they can; the economic crisis, oh that's a big excuse to cut down on staff and make people work harder for the same pay."

Prater stands in solidarity with workers to protest Harvard layoffs.

When asked whether it was fair for union employees to face some repercussions of the recession along with Harvard faculty and students, Caren said, "No, I don't believe it's right for Harvard to make the lowest paid workers pay the price for their risky investments. They made the decisions in the early 2000s to shift their endowment from traditional endowment investments into a lot of extremely speculative endowment investments such as hedge funds, private equity, timber oiling tanks. And of course when the market was doing great, they did fantastic." According to The Harvard Guide, Harvard's endowment was valued at $25.9 billion in 2005. Caren estimated the university's endowment was approximately $36 billion at its height and "is still, by most estimates, at at least $28 billion now." Caren said those who live from paycheck to paycheck should not be the ones who lose out in this recession. "If there's any cuts, it should happen at the top. They pay their top money people millions of dollars per year."

Harvard Management Corporation's Board of Directors is chaired by James F. Rothenberg, a former President and Director of Capital Research and Management Co., and current member of the Harvard Corporation, which also includes in its membership ranks, Robert Rubin, who was forced out of his position as Chairman of Citigroup in January due to poor performance. When asked if any union members had a voice in HMC's investment decisions, Caren said he had no knowledge that was the case. "HMC does things their own way. They don't take advice from anybody." Caren agreed that while bankers and investors make the decisions for Harvard's endowment, it is the unrepresented workers who suffer their consequences.

Brasil Becker said, about HMC's investment strategies, "Universities do not run well under the business cycle. The model where one moment you have the money, the next moment you don't... This is the devastating impact on higher education of this model. We're suffering it today. [...] The Harvard endowment serves a purpose that is supposed to be directly tied to its mission. The purpose of [the] endowment is not to grow in and of itself. The endowment is not the mission of the University. They endowment must serve the mission of the University, and in times of economic duress, the endowment must be used to provide the services needed to keep functioning. Mass layoffs are antithetical to the mission of the University."

Harvard did not return Open Media Boston's request for comment.