UW-Madison Students Stage Sit-in, Demanding Severance With Palermo’s

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Update:The sit-in is over. As of 5:40 p.m., UW police had escorted all students out of the chancellor’s office. At least one student is in police custody.

Students staged a sit-in in the office of University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison Chancellor David Ward.

The sit-in’s motivation comes from the ongoing strike at the Milwaukee-based pizza factory Palermo’s; the participating students say they won’t leave until the university cancels its $200,000 contract with the pizza maker.

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Students have been calling on the chancellor to sever ties with Palermo’s since last November, when the National Labor Relations Board charged the company with violating labor laws by firing workers who were trying to organize a union. Lingran Kong of the UW Student Labor Action Coalition says her group has presented numerous reports on working conditions at the factory to the chancellor in support of their demands for ending the contract. They went so far as to visit the chancellor’s house with a group of striking workers.

“Even when he has been there and the workers traveled all the way from Milwaukee to deliver a letter, and deliver one of these reports with all these findings in it…So it’s not that the facts aren’t there, but it’s that he’s refusing to look at it and he’s refusing to accept it because it’s not what he wants to hear.”

Palermo’s also has contracts with university food services at UW-Milwaukee, Marquette University and the University of Iowa. Efforts to contact the chancellor’s office for comment on the contract have been unsuccessful this afternoon.

Correction: The original version of this story claimed the student group responsible for the sit-in is called the Student Labor Action Council. The name of the group is the Student Labor Action Coalition.