After being informed on a loudspeaker that they had 30 seconds to leave the street or risk arrest, the nine were handcuffed and taken away by a CPD prisoner transport wagon without incident. The street was clear by 5:19 p.m.
The nine arrested were Stephen N. Smith ’02, Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04, Ian Simmons ’98-’00, Harvard Law students Jermaine J. Hughes and Minsu D. Longiaru, janitor Frank Morley, SEIU organizer Jill Hurst, Massachusetts AFL-CIO organizer Kathy Cassavant, and Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers organizer Robert Kelly.
They will be charged with violating a city ordinance against blocking traffic, which is a misdemeanor, and will likely face a minor fine, said Cambridge Police spokesperson Frank D. Pasquarello.
University officials declined to comment on whether the four arrested students would face disciplinary action.
“Freedom of expression is an essential value of a community like this. So also is the avoidance of coercive disruption,” University President Lawrence H. Summers told The Crimson yesterday. “It’s essential to the doctrine of civil disobedience that those who break rules or violate laws accept the consequences of that.”
Before his arrest, Morley, one of the Harvard janitors who has been part of the union’s negotiating team, said that the civil disobedience might anger the University but that it was a necessary tactic for the union.
“We’ve had rallies, we’ve marched, we’ve been negotiating for a month,” Morley said. “We think it may be this is what it will take to do it.”
Following the arrests, supporters continued protesting, with shouts including “arrest Larry Summers,” before the rally wound down at about 5:30 p.m.
SEIU hopes to influence Harvard to raise janitors’ base wages to $14 an hour in today’s contract negotiations at the Sheraton Commander Hotel on Garden Street, union officials have said. The negotiations are in their sixth week, and the two sides have come to little agreement on new wage or benefit provisions, despite resolving many other issues, representatives of both sides have confirmed.
Saenz said she hoped the rally would translate to progress in the negotiations today.
“I think people are feeling very good,” she said. “We have a lot of support from the community and politicians.”
But David A. Jones, who directs Harvard’s Office of Labor and Employee Relations and is lead negotiator for the University, called the rally “unfortunate” and “unproductive” and said that such tactics only disturbed the negotiation process.
“I wish the parties would focus all their energies on trying to resolve the issues at the bargaining table instead of on the streets of Cambridge,” he said.
—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.