New Staff To Face Checks

In response to the arraignment of a Harvard custodian for two counts of indecent assault, Harvard’s security and custodial contractors will soon have to perform criminal background checks on their workers.

Merry Touborg, a spokesperson for the Office of Human Resources (OHR), said that Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel is preparing a letter “with all deliberate speed” to request that contractors begin to investigate the criminal records of their Harvard workers.

The measure comes after the Jan. 20 arrest of Geremias Cruz Ramos, an employee of the custodial contractor Sodexho Inc., for two indecent assaults in Harvard Square.

Ramos, who said he has attacked about 100 women over the past few months, was under a detainer from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) at the time of his arrest.

Police say that Ramos is currently under the custody of immigration officials.

Touborg said that the issue of mandatory background checks for contractors was raised in February after Ramos’s arrest. Harvard already does criminal checks on all in-house employees.

Though the University is currently requesting—not demanding—that contractors perform background checks, Touborg said that these checks will be made mandatory when new agreements are signed with contractors. Touborg said that most agreements are one year long and many will be coming up for renewal soon.

Randy Fenstermacher, a labor activist and a member of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, said that the new policy may have unforeseen consequences and called the background checks “yet another hidden cost of outsourcing.”

“The contractors will no doubt complain that this will increase their administrative costs and that they are therefore entitled to a larger markup on their workers’ labor,” Fenstermacher wrote in an e-mail. “None of this would happen if these jobs, which are clearly a continuing need, were filled by Harvard employees vetted by Human Resources to the same depth and by the same means as any other Harvard employee.”

Touborg said that contractors will have to vet their workers using the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) check, the same check that Harvard uses for its own employees.

Stephen McCombe, the founder and past president of the Harvard University Security, Parking and Museum Guards’ Union (HUSPMGU) representing Harvard’s in-house security guards, questioned the feasibility of implementing background checks.

He said that the fact that many workers are recent immigrants would make it difficult for contractors to comply with this policy.

“I don’t want a criminal or predator working on campus but it is hard to do [background checks] on foreign workers,” McCombe wrote in an e-mail. “The CORI goes back to 18 [years of age].”

However, contractors who already do background checks on their workers say doing checks on immigrants has not been a problem.

“We don’t hire anyone who can’t go through a backgrounding process,” said Anthony “Tony” Miceli, Vice President of Sales at Securitas Security Services USA, a security contractor at Harvard.

Harvard’s largest security contractor, Allied Security (formerly Security Services Inc.), is another contractor that already uses the CORI check to investigate workers, according to Allied Security spokesperson Larry Rubin.

“All employees of Allied Security working at Harvard University have been given a thorough background check prior to their being hired,” Rubin wrote in an e-mail. “All employees who formerly worked for SSI and, as a result of the acquisition are now Allied Security employees, have [also] had background checks completed by Allied Security.”

Unlike these employees, Ramos, the Sodexho employee who worked at Harvard University Health Services (UHS), did not go through a background check before he was hired.

“[Ramos] went through what we call a verification process,” said Stacy Bowman-Hade, a spokesperson for Sodexho. “We verify his ID and Social Security number. That’s all that was required by our client at that time.

“Our policy is to follow the lead of our client,” she added.

As a result of Ramos’s arrest, the University required that Sodhexo do background checks on its UHS workers, Touborg said.

Bowman-Hade said she saw “no problem” in beginning to perform background checks on all Sodexho workers at Harvard, if the University made the request.

“I know we have a lot of employees there that are in good standing,” she said.

—Staff writer May Habib can be reached at habib@fas.harvard.edu.