Thirty-one disadvantaged worker will begin training sessions at Harvard on March 1 in the first phase of a federally funded program which will provide on-the-job training for 79 participants over an 18-month period.

Harvard will choose the participants from a group of workers who have been classifield as "disadvantaged" by the Concentrated Employment Program (CEP) in Boston.

The primary criterion for the "disadvantaged" classification is poverty. CEP is screening applicants according to guidelines set up by the Department of Labor under the MA-5 contract. This contract defines poverty as a non-farm income for a single person of $1600 a year.

Trainees will be paid as employees of Harvard from the first day of their participation. They will receive two hours of classroom training and six on the job each day.

At the end of nine months, workers completing the program will begin regular employment as computer operators, accounting clerks, draftsmen, operating engineers, clerk-typists and key-punch operators.

From Black Community

Edward W. Powers, Harvard labor relations manager, said that he expected most of the participants in the program to come from the black and Spanish communities. "In the Boston area, the disadvantaged tend to be black and Spanish rather than white," Powers said.

Larry Kinnard, the Harvard personnel officer who has supervised work on the MA-5 contract, said the program is a "beginning for training hard-core unemployment at Harvard. Although no specific programs are being planned to followthe expiration of the MA-5 contract, Kinnard and Powers said that more attempts at on-the-job training would follow.

Classroom facilities are presently being prepared in Memorial Hall. Powers said these facilities would be wasted if no training programs were initiated after the MA-5.

Negotiations on the MA-5 contract began in October-well in advance of student protest on Harvard's employment practices, Powers said.