Former HUSPMGU President Steve McCombe said that because Allied’s workers are not unionized, the new positions will be insecure.

“The jobs are going to be reoffered, rebid. What kind of security does this give a worker?” McCombe said.

He said that Allied’s employment contract includes language that allows the company to terminate employment at any time, with or without cause.

“If you were a union worker, would that give you security?” he said.

Thompson and two other guards who asked not to be named said they are also angry that Meagher negotiated the layoffs in secret.

They said that because their current contract did not expire until 2006, and since they just negotiated a new agreement last summer, the impending layoffs came as a surprise.

“They negotiated all of this stuff without notifying us that they were negotiating something like this. If I had known I could have been looking for a job earlier,” Thompson said.

Another guard who did not wish to be identified said that the union “sold [the guards] out. ”

“We have a contract until 2006,” he said. “One of the things the union said was that Harvard University can do whatever they wanted, it’s their business. But if that’s the case, what’s the union for?”

But Meagher said that most contracts are negotiated in secret. He said that he began negotiating the layoff agreement because he “saw the writing on the wall” and predicted that the guards’ jobs would be eliminated anyway. The seven-person in-house guards unit has been shrinking steadily for the last few years.

“Negotiations are generally of a confidential nature until some conclusion is reached in the negotiations,” he said.

But McCombe, who left his position as a guard because of medical reasons this summer, called for Meagher to step down as union chief and said that the confidentiality of negotiations in general did not apply in this case.

“It’s confidential when you’re bargaining for members for a contract,” he said. “But they were bargaining to get rid of members’ jobs. [The workers] should have been asked what they were looking for. When you negotiate a contract, you go to your members and ask them what they want.”

“If [Meagher] doesn’t want to do that, he should think about stepping down,” McCombe said.

But Meagher said that the confidentiality of the negotiations was crucial to the agreement that was reached.

“I think that the negotiations that were conducted were entirely legitimate, and the way we approached it was the reason we were so successful,” he said yesterday.

“We got them the best deal at the University. I have never in my life seen layoffs that included a guarantee of immediate employment,” he added.

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