Some employees said they are concerned by the way Allied Security plans to allocate overtime hours, which workers say SSI has granted generously.

“They made it very clear that they were not going to let us work a lot of overtime,” said another employee who asked not to be identified.

Rubin would not comment on any of Allied Security’s future policies because the deal has not yet been finalized.

The SSI employee repeated what an Allied Security official had told workers at the orientation last weekend: “If I’m paying 25 hours of overtime, I won’t be able to run this company.”

Some employees said the only reason they joined SSI was for the opportunity to work overtime.

“If [Allied Security] says I can only work 35 or 40 hours, I can’t pay my rent. I’ll have to go somewhere else,” said one employee, who has been with SSI for three years. “If they cut down the hours I know 50 percent of these people will quit.”

Muhammad Shams, an SSI security guard at Eliot House, says the situation is not as grave as his colleagues believe. “I don’t think anyone will quit because the majority will not be able to find a better deal than their job at Harvard,” Shams said.

Shams also said that because SSI permits employees to work as many hours as they want, some guards have been logging 90 or 100 hours per week.

“How can someone perform well when they are working 100 hours a week?” Shams said. “There are quality concerns. I think those are the hours that [Allied Security] will cut.”

One SSI employee said that many current workers take off months at a time to visit family in other countries and are allowed to reapply for their old jobs upon returning. He is not sure whether Allied Security will continue to grant workers this privilege.

“[Allied] said you should give us a chance,” he said. “They said it’s not going to be for the worse, it’ll be for the better. But practically speaking, we don’t know.”

—Staff writer May Habib can be reached at habib@fas.harvard.edu.