Guards Say Union Sold Them Out

The Harvard guards who will lose their jobs June 30 say that their union negotiated the layoff deal with Harvard in secret and that the benefits they had been promised would accompany their layoffs are not guaranteed.

The seven security guards—who are the last guards employed directly by the Harvard University Police Department—were told in April that their jobs would be eliminated and replaced by guards from outside contractors.

“I feel like our union sold us out somehow,” said Steven M. Thompson, a Harvard guard and a member of the Harvard University Security, Parking and Museum Guards Union (HUSPMGU). “If I had known they were negotiating something like this, I would have asked them to negotiate for more insurance, more money, so I could get by. [The union] was helping Harvard get rid of us.”

HUSPMGU President Danny Meagher said he approached Harvard several months ago to discuss terms for the layoff of the remaining guards and negotiated a deal that included severance pay, retirement packages and guaranteed employment with Allied Security, Harvard’s largest security contractor.

But several of the guards said they will not be able to collect four weeks of vacation pay due from Harvard because their employment ends June 30, one day shy of the new fiscal year and the ability to collect accrued vacation pay.

Workers learned that they would not receive the vacation pay at the April 9 meeting where Harvard labor officials told them that they would lose their positions.

“At the meeting somebody asked about the vacation and [HUPD Chief Bud] Riley said that that’s the reason we’re letting you off June 30, because the fiscal year starts July 1,” said one of the remaining guards, who asked to remain anonymous. “We earned all that vacation.”

Bill Murphy, the director of the Office of Labor and Employee Relations, said that the University is not attempting to take vacation pay away from employees.

“I understand that that’s the result, but budgets are run on a fiscal year. That’s the actual reason,” he said.

Several guards said they are now worried that the jobs with Allied will not be located at Harvard sites, which they said was also promised at their meeting in April.

Meagher said that Harvard promised at the negotiating table that the laid-off workers would be guaranteed employment with Allied at Harvard sites, meaning that Allied would be required to provide the guards with wages and benefits comparable to those received by other Harvard workers in similar jobs.

“I have no reason to believe that the University will renege on that,” he said. “If they do, then we’ll take them up on that.”

But Merry Touborg, a spokesperson for the Office of Human Resources (OHR), said yesterday that the Allied jobs are not guaranteed to be at Harvard.

“It’s not guaranteed, but the attempt by Allied will be for the jobs to be at Harvard,” Touborg said.

Meagher said yesterday that Touborg was wrong and that the contract guaranteed jobs at Harvard sites.

Former HUSPMGU President Steve McCombe said that because Allied’s workers are not unionized, the new positions will be insecure.

“The jobs are going to be reoffered, rebid. What kind of security does this give a worker?” McCombe said.

He said that Allied’s employment contract includes language that allows the company to terminate employment at any time, with or without cause.

“If you were a union worker, would that give you security?” he said.

Thompson and two other guards who asked not to be named said they are also angry that Meagher negotiated the layoffs in secret.

They said that because their current contract did not expire until 2006, and since they just negotiated a new agreement last summer, the impending layoffs came as a surprise.

“They negotiated all of this stuff without notifying us that they were negotiating something like this. If I had known I could have been looking for a job earlier,” Thompson said.

Another guard who did not wish to be identified said that the union “sold [the guards] out. ”

“We have a contract until 2006,” he said. “One of the things the union said was that Harvard University can do whatever they wanted, it’s their business. But if that’s the case, what’s the union for?”

But Meagher said that most contracts are negotiated in secret. He said that he began negotiating the layoff agreement because he “saw the writing on the wall” and predicted that the guards’ jobs would be eliminated anyway. The seven-person in-house guards unit has been shrinking steadily for the last few years.

“Negotiations are generally of a confidential nature until some conclusion is reached in the negotiations,” he said.

But McCombe, who left his position as a guard because of medical reasons this summer, called for Meagher to step down as union chief and said that the confidentiality of negotiations in general did not apply in this case.

“It’s confidential when you’re bargaining for members for a contract,” he said. “But they were bargaining to get rid of members’ jobs. [The workers] should have been asked what they were looking for. When you negotiate a contract, you go to your members and ask them what they want.”

“If [Meagher] doesn’t want to do that, he should think about stepping down,” McCombe said.

But Meagher said that the confidentiality of the negotiations was crucial to the agreement that was reached.

“I think that the negotiations that were conducted were entirely legitimate, and the way we approached it was the reason we were so successful,” he said yesterday.

“We got them the best deal at the University. I have never in my life seen layoffs that included a guarantee of immediate employment,” he added.

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