“[The sit-in] definitely hasn’t stopped Harvard from outsourcing,” Chew says. “It hasn’t stopped Harvard because it requires a lot of vigilance and organizing to stop that kind of thing.”

That vigilance, members seem to agree, has been absent from PSLM this year, and other groups have had to pick up the organization’s slack.

“It’s been a relatively quiet year for PSLM, but at the same time it’s been a rebuilding year,” says Faisal I. Chaudhry, who was a first-year Harvard Law School student when he participated in the three-week Mass. Hall occupation. “There’s a new current on campus in terms of student activism. PSLM has not only been reconfiguring itself, but also trying to figure out its relationship to these other currents.”

“[PSLM] didn’t play the central role that they played in the sit-in, but I think they’re still playing a good role,” Booth says of the group’s restrained brand of activism this year. “They worked on a consensus model…and there was a consistent one or two people that put the breaks on a whole range of possible tactics. But they played a good role, and eventually came around to all the important issues.”

Mackinnon said the disagreement between PSLM and Socialist Alternative was much more deep seated than Booth suggests. Although the consensus model does limit the scope of the group’s actions, Mackinnon says, the dissent against Socialist Alternative was not limited to just a few people.

Still, Mackinnon says she regrets letting differences prevent the organizations from working together.

“In retrospect, we should have done more and been more organized around the layoffs this year,” she says. “What form that would have taken isn’t really clear.”

Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, who helped found the Harvard Social Forum, a group aimed at bringing together campus activist organizations, says that PSLM has not had a single meeting since first semester, and that there would have to be more “openness and commitment” next year if the group is to remain active.

“It’s going to take a new generation of student labor activists to make sure that tradition lives on,” he says.

Gould-Wartofsky, who is also a Crimson editor, emceed the last labor protest alongside No Layoffs Campaign member Vanessa A. Pope ’07.

A GROUP EFFORT

Despite the Social Forum’s attempts to unite all of Harvard’s activists into one coalition, the Socialist Alternative indisputably took the reins this year. They organized rally after rally with the No Layoffs Campaign, demanding not only a stop to layoffs but increased vigilance from union leaders in protecting their workers.

Fenstermacher said his initial push last April to involve the HUCTW membership in negotiation came from that very instinct, adding that if politics have since divided him from the No Layoffs Campaign, then their mutual disgust with HUCTW’s leadership united them.

Booth says he has been working with colleagues to reform the union since its founding to make it more democratic and more representative of the membership.

Potter, who is also involved in the informal HUCTW reform group, points to the sit-in as an example of the union’s insufficient dedication.