“We were very active in the Living Wage Campaign,” he adds.

According to several members of the Socialist Alternative, combatting layoffs at Harvard was first on the agenda this year. But despite the half-dozen protests they have staged since September, the group was unable to stop the University from cutting some 200 positions.

While some of the group’s protests for the No Layoffs Campaign—which included rallies around Mass. Hall, speeches outside of the Holyoke Center and marches through Harvard Square—drew hundreds of people, the organization was ultimately disappointed with May’s HUCTW contract proposal, which does not include a “no layoffs” clause. Potter and Booth say they will encourage their fellow union members to reject the proposal at the June 17 ratification vote, but expect it will pass anyway.

Fenstermacher, who left the No Layoffs Campaign after losing the HUCTW executive board elections in December, says the group fell short because members refused to launch a truly comprehensive initiative like PSLM’s Living Wage Campaign, which worked for years prior to the Mass. Hall sit-in to garner support from students, faculty and city leadership.

“Socialist Alternative was talking to PSLM about what kind of role they would take, and PSLM just has a different style,” says Fenstermacher, who says he preferred PSLM’s slow burning methods of education and gradual building over the No Layoff Campaign’s action-oriented disposition.

“They’d ask for comments at meetings, and I’d be overruled because the majority around the table was Socialist Alternative,” he says.

POLITICIZING THE ISSUE?

But Booth says that politics are kept out of the No Layoffs Campaign—an independent organization which he says is just one of several causes that Socialist Alternative supported this year.

“We only share about two people,” Booth says, although at least half a dozen activists have said they are part of both the No Layoffs Campaign and Socialist Alternative. “I think the union likes to exaggerate our presence. They try to scare people away from getting involved in the reform movement, which is a lot broader than they give it credit for.”

Booth accuses the union of red-baiting, or trying to block popular support for the No Layoffs Campaign’s cause by attacking the group for its ties with Socialist Alternative.

“They say we’re a bunch of socialists, in a very negative way,” he says. “I’m open with my politics, but we’re working more as a coalition, and there are many people involved who haven’t even thought about politics.”

“The No Layoffs Campaign was separate,” adds Daniel Dimaggio ’04, who is a member of PSLM, Socialist Alternative and the No Layoffs Campaign. “It was much broader than just Socialist Alternative.”

Yet, Fenstermacher and PSLM leaders claim that the political group had an inordinate amount of influence over the No Layoffs Campaign. Fenstermacher says the group let the “rigid ideology” of the Socialist Alternative limit their potential accomplishments.

“On the one hand, they wanted to have the No Layoffs Campaign separate from the Socialist Alternative, but by the same token, they wanted to control it,” he says. “They wanted to be identified as the group who originated the No Layoffs Campaign but at the same time they also wanted to say that it was a coalition.”

Booth, however, points to the high student turnout at the May Day rally in front of Mass. Hall, estimating that most of the supporters there were not affiliated with the Socialist Alternative.