On Friday, April 10, at 11 a.m., around 30 students demonstrated outside Pomona College’s Frary dining hall, yelling, carrying cardboard placards, and banging on buckets. The Claremont Student Workers Alliance (CSWA) organized the protest, which aimed to get 5C students to stop eating in the dining hall and to demand that Rolando “Rolo” Araiza, the recently fired cook, be reinstated.
“We’ve made it clear through petitions and rallies and other actions across Pomona that we understand Rolo’s firing to be a case of union busting and we demand that he be brought back immediately,” Elias Pluecker PO ‘28, CSWA steering member, said. ”However, just showing up and doing petitions and rallies doesn’t actually put real pressure on the school, and what today does is [put] economic pressure on the institution by costing [the College] money.”
Pomona terminated Araiza — a prominent union leader within UNITE HERE local 11 — on Jan. 29, months before the new union contract negotiations were set to begin in June. Since then, CSWA has held rallies, created petitions and organized today’s boycott to draw attention to Araiza’s firing, which CSWA argues is an unjust action to weaken the union before contract negotiations.
Words by Bianca Mirica & Joelle Rudolf | Photo by Maggie Zhang
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