Widener Library worker Randy Fenstermacher makes a habit of reading everything he sees, so when his eye passed over a mysterious looking memo on the screen of a union executive’s computer last April, he couldn’t help but sneak a peek.

Fenstermacher, waiting in the office of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), glanced over the open document, which turned out to be a message from union higher-up Shamim Morani to her colleagues inviting them to meet about upcoming contract renegotiations with the University.

Fenstermacher, a longtime advocate of opening the union’s negotiations process, says he wanted to get himself and his fellow HUCTW members involved in the proceedings right away. He took immediate action, he says, urging friends and colleagues in the union to organize in preparation for the negotiations.

“I started telling people we ought to let these folks know that we’re mindful—that we want more input in the negotiation,” Fenstermacher says.

His calls for representation fell on largely deaf ears, he says, so when he was approached by the No Layoffs Campaign, a group of about 20 Cambridge-area activists and workers who had been trying to reform the union’s policy of closed negotiations since the late 1980s, he jumped at the chance to join them.

The group had formed in September 2003 in response to University-wide budget cuts, outsourcing and hundreds of impending layoffs. From the outset, they took an extreme position against all layoffs at Harvard, citing the University’s $19.3 billion endowment as proof that the ongoing “belt tightening”—which led to layoffs this year of over 200 clerical and administrative workers around the University—was unnecessary.

By October, Fenstermacher was running for the union’s executive board on the platform of the No Layoffs Campaign. He started attending regular meetings and participating in their demonstrations, but before long, he grew wary of the No Layoffs Campaign’s roots in the Harvard Socialist Alternative, which has ties to the Committee for Workers International. According to Fenstermacher, many of the campaign’s participants are also members of Socialist Alternative.

As soon as the Harvard chapter was recognized as an official University club, its members united with workers and took up several causes at once, choosing their battles democratically in group meetings. By the end of their formative period, they had voted to officially oppose the war in Iraq, support pro-choice activism and promote a “progressive labor agenda” at Harvard.

But Socialist Alternative has not always played such a central role in the labor movement on campus.

As the Socialist Alternative builds its campus presence through its members’ involvement in the No Layoffs Campaign—holding over half a dozen public protests since the fall—it has crowded out the formerly ascendant Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM).

PSLM made national headlines in 2001 when it spearheaded a three-week sit-in of Mass. Hall that prompted a review of the University’s labor policies. But since PSLM’s Living Wage Campaign—a three-year movement begun in 1998 which culminated with 50 PSLM members occupying Mass. Hall—came to an informal end, the organization has nearly vanished from the labor frontlines.

The Socialist Alternative, with a more aggressive approach to activism, filled their shoes, taking positions that even PSLM at their most radical might have considered impractical. With a new driver at the wheel this year, labor activism at Harvard took on an entirely unfamiliar face.

SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES

According to Jeffrey H. Booth, a unionized library worker and one of the Socialist Alternative’s most active members, the organization has been a presence in Cambridge since the early 1980s, and although it didn’t start including Harvard students until this year, many of its members have been working together for more than a decade.

“Our comrades have been active as either Harvard union workers or just community activists,” says Socialist Alternative member Thomas E. Potter Jr., a faculty secretary at Harvard Law School.