Students and janitors are gearing up for a rally and a display of civil disobedience in the Square this afternoon in an effort to pressure Harvard into making wage concessions in the on-going labor negotiations.

Tomorrow marks the start of the sixth week of negotiations between the University and Service Employees International Union Local 254 (SEIU), which represents Harvard’s janitors.

The negotiations are the first following the Dec. 19 report of the Harvard Committee on Employee and Contracting Policies (HCECP), which called for higher wages for low-paid workers. University President Lawrence H. Summers largely accepted the report last month.

At the rally this afternoon, however, workers will be asking for an hourly wage that is about $3 above the $10.68 “living wage” figure the city of Cambridge set last year and the $10.83 to $11.30 of the HCECP recommendations.

David A. Jones, Harvard’s top labor negotiator, said the union’s refusal to accept offers around that number was “more than surprising” in light of the call last spring by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) for Harvard to pay a “living wage” and Local 254’s agreement in November for Tufts University janitors to receive base wages of $11.45 starting in 2004.

“It’s kind of hard to follow what the [union] hopes are when the goalpost moves repeatedly,” he said.

SEIU spokesperson Sylvia Panfil defended the union’s demand. She said that since Harvard had more resources than Tufts, it should thus pay a higher wage.

PSLM member Matthew R. Skomarovsky ’02 said that costs of living were growing and were higher in Boston than in Cambridge.

“You can never pick a clear cut-off line between what’s poverty and what’s not poverty,” he said.

Where They Stand

Although the union and Harvard management had set Feb. 19 as a goal date for the talks to conclude, wages and health benefit discussions remain unresolved, and union representatives have repeatedly characterized Harvard as making “no movement” on the two issues.

Yet Jones, who directs the University’s Office of Labor and Employee Relations, said that agreements have been reached on issues including sick leave, vacation time and overtime—in all, 13 of the initial 19 proposals. Four other proposals were withdrawn.

“There has been some rhetoric about the lack of progress in these negotiations, but I would say it is quite to the contrary,” Jones said. “There has been much progress made, and we’ve whittled this down to two issues.”

But Skomarovsky, who has been attending the negotiations, said the agreed-upon issues were “minor” compared to the two that remain—wages and health benefits.

After an early end to last Tuesday’s negotiations, which saw both sides leave frustrated, the University e-mailed a new proposal to SEIU that offered a base wage higher than that of the HCECP report’s range of $10.83 and $11.30, Jones said.