Contact: Austin Guest (831-917-6400), Lucy MacKinnon (347-517-1885)
Harvard Stand for Security Coalition
slam@hcs.harvard.edu || www.stand4security.org
HUNDREDS RALLY FOR FOURTH STRAIGHT DAY IN SUPPORT OF HARVARD SECURITY GUARDS
BOSTON CITY COUNCILMAN CHUCK TURNER SPEAKS IN SUPPORT OF HUNGER STRIKERS’ DEMANDS
This Thursday at 1pm, over a hundred Harvard students and workers turned out for the fourth day of mass rallies in support of newly unionized Harvard security guards and the 10 Harvard students who are on the eight day of an ongoing hunger strike to protest Harvard’s failure to take responsibility for ensuring that the guards receive fair wages and working conditions in ongoing collective bargaining negotiations with security firm AlliedBarton.
At the rally, students and workers marched around Harvard President Derek Bok’s office as they have every day for the past four days. Citing the Presidents’ failure to agree to meet with hunger strikers and other concerned students, the crowd chanted “What’s your problem Derek Bok, all we want to do is talk?” and “Whose Harvard? Our Harvard!” before forming a single file line and asking one by one to be admitted to the offices of the President. Each person in the line was denied access to the office by a team of five armed police officers who said they were acting on order from the Presidents’ office not to allow anyone to enter.
Last in the line was Boston City Councilman Chuck Turner, who attempted to deliver a letter signed by himself and eight other city councilmen that accused Harvard of “denying its responsibility to campus workers” and “shifting the burden of its labor costs onto the city and onto the taxpayers.” Despite a lengthy discussion with police officers on the steps of Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall, Turner was denied entrance to Bok’s office. He then turned to give an address to the crowd of gathered students in which he commended them for their outspoken support of the security guards and told them “You are Harvard’s moral teachers.”
The rally came amidst news that leaders from the Harvard Stand for Security Coalition had met with Harvard’s Director of Labor Relations Committee and were demanding a meeting with Harvard’s Vice President Alan Stone to discuss the formation of an independent committee of students, faculty, workers, and administrators to objectively assess the Coalition’s claims that Harvard’s security guard wages, at $12.68 an hour, are excessively low because they fall short not only of Cambridge and Boston self-sufficiency standards, but also of wages for other service sector workers at Harvard and security guard wages at other elite Universities around the nation.
