RESISTING A COALITION

The rallies not only drew a diverse crowd, Booth says, but a diverse range of sponsors.

Almost all of the No Layoffs Campaign rallies were credited to many organizations at once, including the Socialist Alternative, the Harvard Social Forum Labor Caucus, the Harvard janitors’ union and, despite the lack of an official group endorsement, PSLM.

Indeed, individual members of PSLM did support the No Layoffs Campaign.

But officially, the two groups had stopped cooperating in February, when what PSLM members described as a tense joint meeting revealed that their diverging methodologies were an irreconcilable difference.

Emma S. Mackinnon ’05, who has remained active in PSLM since her first year at Harvard, says her group is more interested in having a long-term strategy than a sporadic rally here and there.

“In order to even have a campaign, you have to figure out who’s making the decisions, and what demands you can reasonably put on what people. You can’t run a campaign if you don’t know who you’re organizing against,” she says. “I think there was some confusion in the No Layoffs Campaign about which Harvard administrators could decide what, and how to make which demands. They were much more about organizing and showing force.”

Still, PSLM endorsed the No Layoffs Campaign’s rallies, and many members repeatedly came out in support of their cause.

“In some sense it was a coalition,” Fenstermacher says, “because PSLM folks did show up for some of the demonstrations. But PSLM set about having meetings with administration and some of the Socialist Alternative folks concluded that that meant that they were collaborating with the enemy.”

“We often have been accused of cavorting with administrators, which I think is ridiculous,” says Mackinnon, who is also a Crimson editor. “But we are, in that sense, a more mainstream organizing group.”

According to Fenstermacher, there was talk of splitting the No Layoffs Campaign into two separate factions, with the Socialist Alternative leading one and PSLM leading the other.

The idea was quickly discarded, and as a result, PSLM took a backseat to the new school of campus labor activists and focused instead on lobbying for the University to enter into the Workers’ Rights Consortium, an international sweatshop watchdog group that Harvard ended up joining in December.

PSLM TAKES A BREATHER

According to H. Amelia Chew ’04-’05, who was tangentially involved in the 2001 sit-in before taking a year off to study labor policy, most of the organization’s veterans had either graduated or taken up theses by the time the new labor movement on campus took off.

Indeed, with the exception of a minor demonstration in November, PSLM did not initiate much action in the name of Harvard workers this year, even though many members say the University has begun tiptoeing away from the promises it made following the sit-in.