The number of in-house security guards has steadily decreased since last year.

Last June, an optional buyout package reduced the number of workers from 17 to the current seven. At the time, University officials expressed a desire to move to a single contractor in the security sector for increased efficiency.

Touborg suggested that these recent layoffs may also be a product of this strategy.

“We do have a lot of trouble,” Touborg said yesterday. “They’re so scattered that it’s hard to oversee them.”

Daniel DiMaggio ’04, a member of the Progressive Students’ Labor Movement (PSLM) and the No Layoffs Campaign, said that Harvard’s decision to eliminate the unionized security guard positions was “sick” and “pretty disturbing.”

“In all of their options the guards will be left without a union,” Dimaggio said. “The University has told these workers that they will take their union from them.”

“[University officials] say that they have to move to one security vendor, but it’s no coincidence that it’s a non-union company.”

Allied Security, Harvard’s largest security vendor, is a non-unionized company.

Meagher credited DiMaggio and the PSLM for helping HUSPMGU preserve the jobs of the seven workers last summer.

“These jobs would have been cut last July if it wasn’t for Dan DiMaggio and the PSLM and the protest they organized,” Meagher said.

DiMaggio, who participated in PSLM’s Mass. Hall sit-in in April 2001, said that this “shows the value of organizing protests and rallies against Harvard in support of campus workers and unions.”

“I think that Harvard is only afraid when workers fight back and when workers and students join to fight its attack.”

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