Tufts Students Go On Hunger Strike To Protest Layoffs

Five Tufts students are starving themselves to protest pending cuts to their university’s custodial staff.

Sunday afternoon, a group of approximately 100 of their fellow students and labor activists gathered in the campus’s academic quad to give the hunger strikers a collective pat on the back, and conduct a bilingual demonstration against why they say is Tufts’s prioritizing the bottom line over workers’ livelihoods.

“This just shows how powerful the connection is between students and staff,” said Jenna Sherman, asked why she’s willing to stop eating for a cause that doesn’t impact her directly. She says she considers the custodial staff just as important to Tufts as the students or professors.

Sherman, originally from Alabama, joins the hunger strike with fellow sophomores Zoe Jeka, along with freshmen Arismer Angeles, Ander Pierce, and Mica Jarmel-Schneider.

Since November, Tufts Labor Coalition and its allies have tried to dissuade the administration from laying off 35 janitors - roughly 17 percent of its total custodial staff - in early June.

They say their actions have included meeting weekly with university officials, in addition to numerous sit-ins, marches, and rallies. According to TLC members, they’ve mostly been ignored and/or condescended to by Tufts administrators throughout their efforts.

“We’ve been talking to a deaf ear, essentially,” said Sherman, explaining why she and her associates are undertaking such dire measures.

On Thursday, seven protesters were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct during a march in support of the janitors’ union.

Tufts Police ordered members of the media to leave the campus during Sunday’s rally. Their request was ignored by almost every reporter on hand.

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