Wendy’s time at the Ohio State University is over, say fair-labor activists who oppose the restaurant’s use of produce from Mexico. Now a contentious two-year battle with the fast-food franchise on campus has come to a head, with students borrowing a protest tactic from the University of Missouri playbook.
On Monday, 19 students and alumni began a weeklong hunger strike to pressure the Ohio State University to end the restaurant’s lease in Wexner Medical Center — and “Boot the Braids.”
The Wendy’s has had a relatively controversy-free existence at the university-owned Wexel Center since the 1990s, WOSU, a Columbus-based NPR affiliate reports. However, activists began targeting this franchise location in 2014 when the corporate Wendy’s, headquartered in nearby Dublin, Ohio, refused to sign on to the Fair Food Program, which promotes fair pay and safer conditions for American agricultural workers. Fast-food eateries Burger King, McDonalds and Taco Bell have signed on to the United Nations-endorsed project.
“Wendy’s represents the worst of corporate greed locally and nationally,” Ohio for Fair Food and Farmworker Justice said in a Facebook post announcing the hunger strike earlier this month. “Through funding political campaigns built on a platform of division and hate, and partnering with local developers on projects that drive Columbus’s most vulnerable communities from their homes, Wendy’s has failed its own community […]”
Though the fast-food restaurant’s opponents haven’t yet succeeded in shuttering it, they won a concession from Wendy’s, according to The Lantern: they convinced OSU to add language to Wendy’s lease stating that the restaurant would work toward “a resolution of the concerns of the Student Farmworkers Alliance regarding the procurement of tomatoes for the operation of Tenant’s business at the Premise that is satisfactory to Landlord in its sole discretion.”
However, representatives from Ohio State Student/Farmworker Alliance, one of the groups responsible for this week’s hunger strike, reversed course, refusing to meet with the restaurant. OSU allowed Wendy’s to renew its contract.
On Monday, protesters filed into the office of OSU President Michael Drake to hand-deliver a letter demanding the university end its contract with Wendy’s when the restaurant’s lease at Wexner Center expires in December.
Since Monday protesters have been camped outside Bricker Hall, administrative building, at times succeeding at coaxing administrators, including senior vice president for student life Javaune Adams-Gaston, outside to speak with them
“We want (University President Michael Drake) to come and explain that if they can end their Wendy’s contract now, why aren’t they doing that,” graduate student Ben Wibking, a hunger striker, told The Lantern on Monday.
Hunger strikers will meet with administrators on Friday where “we expect their final decision on whether they will stay true to their word,” protest organizers said in a Facebook event.
Protest organizers did not immediately respond to multiple emailed requests for comment from Heat Street on Thursday.