On Monday, as a dozen protesters staged a sit-in at Interim Chancellor David Ward’s office, the dispute over labor violations by Palermo’s Pizza was thrust into the campus spotlight.
While the event failed to achieve its only stated objective of forcing Ward to cut the contract with the Milwaukee-based pizza manufacturer Palermo’s, it was wildly successful in another respect: drawing ample negative attention to the Student Labor Action Coalition and the group UWMad@Palermo’s. But by employing their usual petulant tactics, it was clear SLAC did not have a mature or thoughtful policy discussion in mind.
If SLAC’s goal with the event was to affect real policy change, a sit-in was entirely the wrong tactic. For one, it is absurd for this group to believe they could motivate a chancellor whose time in office has been characterized by extreme inertia at best and categorical avoidance of decisionmaking on any substantive campus issue at worst. Ward is even less likely to cut the contract on his way out the door, lest he step on Rebecca Blank’s toes before she takes office in July.
The event also demonstrates a high degree of naivete about the chancellor’s basic job duties. Case in point: Ward wasn’t sitting in his office and wasn’t avoiding a confrontation with the group sitting in. Instead, the University of Wisconsin Police Department reported he was off-campus for a meeting during much of the day. So by storming the top campus official’s office unannounced and demanding Ward make a major unilateral policy change, SLAC and its allies could not have been expecting a meeting with the chancellor. Rather, they were expecting just another line on their student activism resumes.
Let us be clear: This board is not organizing a pizza party with Palermo’s pepperoni any time soon – some of us are actively, but quietly, boycotting the company for their conduct in the labor dispute.
Although the federal National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of the company Monday, saying they did not violate labor regulations with the employee immigration audit, executives are not blameless. Now that the federal labor board has ruled on the matter, Palermo’s must make good on its promise to provide back pay for the fired workers. The company should also let workers form a union to allow for adequate representation should there be labor disputes in the future.
Student organizers were likely aware their sit-in and subsequent rally would not force Ward to rule on Palermo’s. And by abandoning moderate, rational discourse in favor of a sit-in, they failed to inspire any new sympathy or support from the student body at large for the plight of the Palermo’s workers. Instead, they pushed the issue even further outside of students’ collective consciousness in yet another episode of SLAC’s eternal race to the far left.
But no one individual was more emblematic of the out-of-touch nature of the protesters than UW student Maxwell Love, with his ill-advised and misleading all-campus email and subsequent arrest at Bascom Hall. In the puzzling message, Love seemed intent on stringing together as many buzz words to appeal to the general populous as possible: Students should turn up on Bascom for pizza courtesy of the chancellor! For Mifflin! For Revelry!
The email read: “Obviously Bucky is not happy and neither should you be. Come join the chancellor for some pizza!”
His message was so garbled that it prompted a clarifying tweet from @UWMadison, saying Ward was in no way planning on feeding the protesters (although Ian’s Pizza did send some slices their way, bringing back memories of the Capitol in February 2011).
But Love upped the ante by insisting on being arrested by police attempting to close the building. Rather than a fight in the name of workers’ rights, Love shouted from the back of a police van was emblematic of the failed event, which was a shameless ploy for attention rather than a call to get a seat at the table.
Moving forward, Blank and other campus stakeholders should have the opportunity to respond to the dispute in a calm, organized and representative venue. But for now, the case is closed: Ward was never likely to cut Palermo’s, but he’s exponentially less likely to take action on the dispute before leaving the university.
So by staging this kind of a stunt, SLAC and other organizers were simply performing baseless civil disobedience for its own sake and for their own goals. And since the ink on the NLRB report has barely dried, campus organizers should save their poster board and any future sit-in plans until Palermo’s responds to the recommendations.
Wheeling and dealing with corporations can be a dirty business. The rules of the game mean that doing business with corporations will sometimes leave your hands dirty, as was the case with University of Wisconsin’s stake in the Palermo’s dispute. But the fight is over. So please, go home, and stop promising us pizza.
