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Harvard security guards presented proposals asking for wage increases that keep up with inflation and expanded retirement options during their first bargaining session with Securitas Security Services on Wednesday.

Service Employees International Union’s Local 32BJ represents roughly 300 security guards at Harvard, who are employed by the third-party contractor Securitas. Their contract expires Nov. 15. Because the guards are not directly employed by the University, which is considered a Securitas client, they bargain with the contractor instead.

Alongside wage increases and retirement options, the union’s negotiating team also requested a joint union-employer legal fund to help workers with immigration-related issues and a year of guaranteed unpaid leave without loss of seniority for workers taking time off for immigration issues. Similar demands were made by Harvard custodial workers in their first bargaining session with the University on Tuesday.

Guard and bargaining committee member Yahya Bajinka said workers need wages that will keep up with inflation, which has floated near 3 percent since 2023.

“We’ve been pretty much struggling, especially after this pandemic,” Bajinka said. “Then we are all aware of the fact that basic commodities are hiking, skyrocketing.”

“We want a fair wage. As the saying goes, ‘We are needy, we are not greedy,’” he added.

While Harvard does not employ security workers, it adopted a wage and benefit parity policy in 2002 to ensure pay parity between subcontracted workers and directly employed workers in similar positions. But since all campus security workers are subcontracted by Securitas, there is no direct way to compare their pay with a Harvard employee’s.

The issue came to a head in 2022, when a guard filed a labor complaint against both Securitas and Harvard. The complaint was eventually settled, so a judge did not have to issue a final determination on whether Harvard and Securitas were joint employers.

At the Tuesday rally after custodians’ first negotiation session, guard Heather A. Hayes urged the University to commit to supporting its security workers even as it weathers a financial storm, referencing working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We understand that the University is facing a new threat with unfriendly administration and budget cuts,” she said. “We know that working people across everywhere — they’re having the same struggles as us or similar struggles, but we don’t work just anywhere. We work at Harvard.”

This year’s negotiations also follow a particularly contentious set of negotiations from 2022, when workers voted down a contract offer and bargaining committee members alleged that 32BJ leaders had shut them out of negotiations. Harvard security guard Walter J. Terzano also submitted a petition in 2022 to decertify 32BJ as guards’ representative, though the attempt failed because documents were submitted too late.

Communication issues also clouded the opening of this year’s negotiations. Many workers did not know when negotiations would begin until late September or which guards would represent them at the table.

One security guard said they were asked to serve on the bargaining committee without having collected signatures from other workers first, which had been a requirement for serving on the committee in years prior, according to four guards.

32BJ is not required by its contract with Securitas or its bylaws to select bargaining committee members via signatures or a vote. 32BJ spokesperson Franklin Soults wrote in a statement that “the process of selecting bargaining committee members can and does change over time.”

“The union is committed to a process that ensures a committee that represents different work areas of campus, involves all active stewards, and reflects different levels of experience and the language diversity of the membership,” Soults wrote.

Communications from the union began flowing through a few weeks before bargaining began, but caused confusion for some workers.

Guard Aryt Alasti, a member of the union who pays dues, received an automated message from the union in late September notifying him that he would need to sign a union card to participate in the process moving forward and to vote on the contract.

When Alasti asked about the inconsistency, he was told he needed an “updated card,” though Soults clarified that workers only needed to have signed a card once to vote on contracts.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at hugo.chiasson@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.