No Layoffs

Since the fall of 2008, after news of Harvard’s endowment loss and the impending budgetary changes, SLAM has placed pressure on administrators, staging rallies, hosting teach-ins and worker talks, and continuously trying to communicate alternative approaches to budgetary cuts. After a wave of layoffs and cuts during the summer, we maintain that layoffs are still unnecessary and that alternative mechanisms for budgetary cuts exist.

We also maintain our basic demands. We demand a Harvard that is just. We demand a meeting with the President, the Corporation, relevant University administrators, students, and staff in order to begin working together on creative and alternative solutions to layoffs; we demand that Harvard suspends layoffs and recall all workers, full-time and temporary, laid off due to budget cuts since October 2008; we demand that Harvard not reduce the hours of its workers putting them below a living wage; we demand that Harvard not ask its remaining workers to do an unsafe amount of additional work due to the hiring freeze; we demand that Harvard treat its workers with dignity and respect.

Bring Back the Hyatt 100

On August 31, all three Hyatt hotels in Boston and Cambridge fired their housekeepers. Many of these housekeepers worked for Hyatt for over 20 years, and all were dismissed after they were asked to train their replacements. Hyatt's actions have been condemned by student, labor, and religious groups across the country, including Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Now we want Harvard and all its student groups to do the right thing and respect the boycott of Hyatt hotels until the "Hyatt 100" return to work.

HEI Workers Rising

Workers at hotels in California and Virginia run by HEI Hotels and Resorts are under attack because they want a fair process to decide whether or not to have a union. While workers face harassment and intimidation for standing up and speaking out, HEI uses the good name of its investors to rake in more money and improve its public image. Who are those investors? Mainly Ivy League universities like Yale, Brown, and Harvard. We are calling on the administration to use its role as an investor in HEI to pressure that company to drop intimidation and let its workers decide for themselves whether they want a union or not.