By Karen Klinger

Janitor Bedardo Sola and barber Fred Iannacone have never met, but they have something in common: a reliance on the world’s richest university for their livelihoods.

As they have discovered, that is not necessarily a good thing.

For the past five years, Sola has cleaned rooms at Harvard University, proud that he worked at such as prestigious college, as he told his relatives in his home country of El Salvador. But that was before he was one of nine low-wage workers the university laid off, with plans to cut 10 more amid a deepening recession and a plummeting endowment.

Then, he got a reprieve. He was reinstated, but only with the understanding that he would have to work harder to take up the slack left by other workers who were let go, he told Cambridge city councilors at their April 6 meeting.

He is happy to be working, but anguished about the fate of former co-workers whose families depend on their wages.

Iannacone’s attorney, former city councilor Katherine Triantafillou, told the council that her client’s work also depended on Harvard, but in a much different way. For 38 years, “Fred the Barber,” as he’s known, has been cutting hair in space he leases from the university.

His “Central Barber Shop” is the only business still operating in the one-story building at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Everett Street once known as the “Bence Pharmacy,” and more recently as the “Three Aces,” for a pizza parlor adjacent to his place.

Triantafillou said that in mid-January, Harvard sent notices to Iannacone and the Three Aces owner terminating their leases as of Jan. 30, 2010. “There was no warning. There was no conversation. They were told on January 16, ‘You’re out of business,’” she said.

This happened despite the fact that Iannacone was in the middle of a five-year lease. He believed, along with the local Agassiz neighborhood association, that Harvard had offered assurances that the tenants could extend their leases until at least 2017.

But buried in the lease agreement was a clause that said, “We have an absolute right to terminate you at any time for any reason,” said Triantafillou, adding that it appeared zoning regulations stipulate that once Harvard-owned retail space on that part of Mass Ave. is vacated, the university “can do what it wants.”

She said the reason given by Harvard for clearing the building of tenants is that it needs to clean up contamination of the site caused by chemicals once used by a former lessee, Crimson Cleaners, which moved out three years ago. But last August, the university told Iannacone that “everything was fine,” she said.

Councilor Ken Reeves, noting that he lived “around the corner” from Three Aces for 20 years, observed that “It has been known that there is contaminated soil there since I’ve been alive.”

“This is a subterfuge,” he said.

Reeves, a Harvard alumnus, said, “It’s not fair. I think they (the tenants) thought there was some good faith there” on the part of the university.

While the Three Aces owner moved out after he was unable to sell his business, Iannacone—like Bedardo Sola—has a reprieve that will enable him to continue working. A shop in an adjacent building moved out and he’s now renting the space, carrying two leases and preparing to move his barber shop into it sometime next January.

He’s happy for that stroke of luck, but still angry about his treatment by the university. “Harvard lies and lies,” he said in an interview in March (www.cctvcambridge.org/node/12379). “They lie to the neighborhood, they lie to the tenants, they lie to the city and everybody lets them get away with it.”

In a show of solidarity with the Harvard cleaners who are losing their jobs, Councilor Marjorie Decker introduced a resolution offering to forgive $398,372 the university would otherwise pay the city in lieu of property taxes if it would keep them on.

She said she initially thought of the resolution as a “tongue in cheek” ploy to shame Harvard into rethinking the layoffs. But she wondered if Cambridge should just say to Harvard, “Keep your money,” if the school is in such dire financial straits.

In the end, a motion by Reeves put off any action on the proposal. For Harvard, it could not help that news reports indicate professor and former university president Larry Summers (now President Obama’s chief economic adviser) was paid $529,000 last year—about three times the average salary of other tenured faculty members—while simultaneously making nearly $5.2 million working for a New York hedge fund

It is not clear what, if anything, the council can do about the laid-off workers at Harvard, amid ongoing protests. Councilor Larry Ward said that while he was sympathetic, he did not want to make a “statement just for making a statement’s sake, if it’s not going to do anything for them.”