As PSLM Rests Up, a New Alternative Rises

Widener Library worker Randy Fenstermacher makes a habit of reading everything he sees, so when his eye passed over a mysterious looking memo on the screen of a union executive’s computer last April, he couldn’t help but sneak a peek.

Fenstermacher, waiting in the office of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), glanced over the open document, which turned out to be a message from union higher-up Shamim Morani to her colleagues inviting them to meet about upcoming contract renegotiations with the University.

Fenstermacher, a longtime advocate of opening the union’s negotiations process, says he wanted to get himself and his fellow HUCTW members involved in the proceedings right away. He took immediate action, he says, urging friends and colleagues in the union to organize in preparation for the negotiations.

“I started telling people we ought to let these folks know that we’re mindful—that we want more input in the negotiation,” Fenstermacher says.

His calls for representation fell on largely deaf ears, he says, so when he was approached by the No Layoffs Campaign, a group of about 20 Cambridge-area activists and workers who had been trying to reform the union’s policy of closed negotiations since the late 1980s, he jumped at the chance to join them.

The group had formed in September 2003 in response to University-wide budget cuts, outsourcing and hundreds of impending layoffs. From the outset, they took an extreme position against all layoffs at Harvard, citing the University’s $19.3 billion endowment as proof that the ongoing “belt tightening”—which led to layoffs this year of over 200 clerical and administrative workers around the University—was unnecessary.

By October, Fenstermacher was running for the union’s executive board on the platform of the No Layoffs Campaign. He started attending regular meetings and participating in their demonstrations, but before long, he grew wary of the No Layoffs Campaign’s roots in the Harvard Socialist Alternative, which has ties to the Committee for Workers International. According to Fenstermacher, many of the campaign’s participants are also members of Socialist Alternative.

As soon as the Harvard chapter was recognized as an official University club, its members united with workers and took up several causes at once, choosing their battles democratically in group meetings. By the end of their formative period, they had voted to officially oppose the war in Iraq, support pro-choice activism and promote a “progressive labor agenda” at Harvard.

But Socialist Alternative has not always played such a central role in the labor movement on campus.

As the Socialist Alternative builds its campus presence through its members’ involvement in the No Layoffs Campaign—holding over half a dozen public protests since the fall—it has crowded out the formerly ascendant Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM).

PSLM made national headlines in 2001 when it spearheaded a three-week sit-in of Mass. Hall that prompted a review of the University’s labor policies. But since PSLM’s Living Wage Campaign—a three-year movement begun in 1998 which culminated with 50 PSLM members occupying Mass. Hall—came to an informal end, the organization has nearly vanished from the labor frontlines.

The Socialist Alternative, with a more aggressive approach to activism, filled their shoes, taking positions that even PSLM at their most radical might have considered impractical. With a new driver at the wheel this year, labor activism at Harvard took on an entirely unfamiliar face.

SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES

According to Jeffrey H. Booth, a unionized library worker and one of the Socialist Alternative’s most active members, the organization has been a presence in Cambridge since the early 1980s, and although it didn’t start including Harvard students until this year, many of its members have been working together for more than a decade.

“Our comrades have been active as either Harvard union workers or just community activists,” says Socialist Alternative member Thomas E. Potter Jr., a faculty secretary at Harvard Law School.

“We were very active in the Living Wage Campaign,” he adds.

According to several members of the Socialist Alternative, combatting layoffs at Harvard was first on the agenda this year. But despite the half-dozen protests they have staged since September, the group was unable to stop the University from cutting some 200 positions.

While some of the group’s protests for the No Layoffs Campaign—which included rallies around Mass. Hall, speeches outside of the Holyoke Center and marches through Harvard Square—drew hundreds of people, the organization was ultimately disappointed with May’s HUCTW contract proposal, which does not include a “no layoffs” clause. Potter and Booth say they will encourage their fellow union members to reject the proposal at the June 17 ratification vote, but expect it will pass anyway.

Fenstermacher, who left the No Layoffs Campaign after losing the HUCTW executive board elections in December, says the group fell short because members refused to launch a truly comprehensive initiative like PSLM’s Living Wage Campaign, which worked for years prior to the Mass. Hall sit-in to garner support from students, faculty and city leadership.

“Socialist Alternative was talking to PSLM about what kind of role they would take, and PSLM just has a different style,” says Fenstermacher, who says he preferred PSLM’s slow burning methods of education and gradual building over the No Layoff Campaign’s action-oriented disposition.

“They’d ask for comments at meetings, and I’d be overruled because the majority around the table was Socialist Alternative,” he says.

POLITICIZING THE ISSUE?

But Booth says that politics are kept out of the No Layoffs Campaign—an independent organization which he says is just one of several causes that Socialist Alternative supported this year.

“We only share about two people,” Booth says, although at least half a dozen activists have said they are part of both the No Layoffs Campaign and Socialist Alternative. “I think the union likes to exaggerate our presence. They try to scare people away from getting involved in the reform movement, which is a lot broader than they give it credit for.”

Booth accuses the union of red-baiting, or trying to block popular support for the No Layoffs Campaign’s cause by attacking the group for its ties with Socialist Alternative.

“They say we’re a bunch of socialists, in a very negative way,” he says. “I’m open with my politics, but we’re working more as a coalition, and there are many people involved who haven’t even thought about politics.”

“The No Layoffs Campaign was separate,” adds Daniel Dimaggio ’04, who is a member of PSLM, Socialist Alternative and the No Layoffs Campaign. “It was much broader than just Socialist Alternative.”

Yet, Fenstermacher and PSLM leaders claim that the political group had an inordinate amount of influence over the No Layoffs Campaign. Fenstermacher says the group let the “rigid ideology” of the Socialist Alternative limit their potential accomplishments.

“On the one hand, they wanted to have the No Layoffs Campaign separate from the Socialist Alternative, but by the same token, they wanted to control it,” he says. “They wanted to be identified as the group who originated the No Layoffs Campaign but at the same time they also wanted to say that it was a coalition.”

Booth, however, points to the high student turnout at the May Day rally in front of Mass. Hall, estimating that most of the supporters there were not affiliated with the Socialist Alternative.

RESISTING A COALITION

The rallies not only drew a diverse crowd, Booth says, but a diverse range of sponsors.

Almost all of the No Layoffs Campaign rallies were credited to many organizations at once, including the Socialist Alternative, the Harvard Social Forum Labor Caucus, the Harvard janitors’ union and, despite the lack of an official group endorsement, PSLM.

Indeed, individual members of PSLM did support the No Layoffs Campaign.

But officially, the two groups had stopped cooperating in February, when what PSLM members described as a tense joint meeting revealed that their diverging methodologies were an irreconcilable difference.

Emma S. Mackinnon ’05, who has remained active in PSLM since her first year at Harvard, says her group is more interested in having a long-term strategy than a sporadic rally here and there.

“In order to even have a campaign, you have to figure out who’s making the decisions, and what demands you can reasonably put on what people. You can’t run a campaign if you don’t know who you’re organizing against,” she says. “I think there was some confusion in the No Layoffs Campaign about which Harvard administrators could decide what, and how to make which demands. They were much more about organizing and showing force.”

Still, PSLM endorsed the No Layoffs Campaign’s rallies, and many members repeatedly came out in support of their cause.

“In some sense it was a coalition,” Fenstermacher says, “because PSLM folks did show up for some of the demonstrations. But PSLM set about having meetings with administration and some of the Socialist Alternative folks concluded that that meant that they were collaborating with the enemy.”

“We often have been accused of cavorting with administrators, which I think is ridiculous,” says Mackinnon, who is also a Crimson editor. “But we are, in that sense, a more mainstream organizing group.”

According to Fenstermacher, there was talk of splitting the No Layoffs Campaign into two separate factions, with the Socialist Alternative leading one and PSLM leading the other.

The idea was quickly discarded, and as a result, PSLM took a backseat to the new school of campus labor activists and focused instead on lobbying for the University to enter into the Workers’ Rights Consortium, an international sweatshop watchdog group that Harvard ended up joining in December.

PSLM TAKES A BREATHER

According to H. Amelia Chew ’04-’05, who was tangentially involved in the 2001 sit-in before taking a year off to study labor policy, most of the organization’s veterans had either graduated or taken up theses by the time the new labor movement on campus took off.

Indeed, with the exception of a minor demonstration in November, PSLM did not initiate much action in the name of Harvard workers this year, even though many members say the University has begun tiptoeing away from the promises it made following the sit-in.

“[The sit-in] definitely hasn’t stopped Harvard from outsourcing,” Chew says. “It hasn’t stopped Harvard because it requires a lot of vigilance and organizing to stop that kind of thing.”

That vigilance, members seem to agree, has been absent from PSLM this year, and other groups have had to pick up the organization’s slack.

“It’s been a relatively quiet year for PSLM, but at the same time it’s been a rebuilding year,” says Faisal I. Chaudhry, who was a first-year Harvard Law School student when he participated in the three-week Mass. Hall occupation. “There’s a new current on campus in terms of student activism. PSLM has not only been reconfiguring itself, but also trying to figure out its relationship to these other currents.”

“[PSLM] didn’t play the central role that they played in the sit-in, but I think they’re still playing a good role,” Booth says of the group’s restrained brand of activism this year. “They worked on a consensus model…and there was a consistent one or two people that put the breaks on a whole range of possible tactics. But they played a good role, and eventually came around to all the important issues.”

Mackinnon said the disagreement between PSLM and Socialist Alternative was much more deep seated than Booth suggests. Although the consensus model does limit the scope of the group’s actions, Mackinnon says, the dissent against Socialist Alternative was not limited to just a few people.

Still, Mackinnon says she regrets letting differences prevent the organizations from working together.

“In retrospect, we should have done more and been more organized around the layoffs this year,” she says. “What form that would have taken isn’t really clear.”

Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, who helped found the Harvard Social Forum, a group aimed at bringing together campus activist organizations, says that PSLM has not had a single meeting since first semester, and that there would have to be more “openness and commitment” next year if the group is to remain active.

“It’s going to take a new generation of student labor activists to make sure that tradition lives on,” he says.

Gould-Wartofsky, who is also a Crimson editor, emceed the last labor protest alongside No Layoffs Campaign member Vanessa A. Pope ’07.

A GROUP EFFORT

Despite the Social Forum’s attempts to unite all of Harvard’s activists into one coalition, the Socialist Alternative indisputably took the reins this year. They organized rally after rally with the No Layoffs Campaign, demanding not only a stop to layoffs but increased vigilance from union leaders in protecting their workers.

Fenstermacher said his initial push last April to involve the HUCTW membership in negotiation came from that very instinct, adding that if politics have since divided him from the No Layoffs Campaign, then their mutual disgust with HUCTW’s leadership united them.

Booth says he has been working with colleagues to reform the union since its founding to make it more democratic and more representative of the membership.

Potter, who is also involved in the informal HUCTW reform group, points to the sit-in as an example of the union’s insufficient dedication.

“At that time, HUCTW was in contract negotiations,” he says. “They got a living wage for their lowest paid, and as soon as they had that, they basically dropped out. They said they didn’t have a living wage problem at HUCTW, and they dropped out. The progressive labor community at large were thunderstruck by that utter lack of solidarity with the campaign.”

HUCTW director Bill Jaeger declined to comment on the Socialist Alternative and the No Layoffs Campaign. The union’s leaders have traditionally chosen not to respond to attacks from the group’s members, defending their own negotiating tactics by pointing to recent wage increases and gains in work security.

The cause of union reform, however, has been picked up by the Harvard Social Forum as well, and as the activist coalition at Harvard becomes more diverse, PSLM and Socialist Alternative members alike expect an eruption of protest activity next year.

Chaudhry says PSLM’s current lull is merely the calm before a storm, likening the general labor movement’s current atmosphere to the years which preceded 2001’s sit-in.

“There is a well of community and campus support for workers on campus that remains and that is deepened as organizing unfolds outside of the context of the large headline-grabbing events like the sit-in,” he says.

Mackinnon confirms that PSLM continues to be motivated by the uncertain labor climate at Harvard and will be getting on board in one way or another, adapting to changes in its own structure as seniors graduate.

If PSLM picks up again, however, it may have to compete with the ambitions of Socialist Alternative.

“I think Socialist Alternative is going to be very involved in playing the leading role as we have this year,” says Dimaggio.

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.