APRIL FOOLS- Police raid pizza sweatshop, students protest

Police charged into a dimly lit kitchen last Friday and found students hunched over hot ovens,… Police charged into a dimly lit kitchen last Friday and found students hunched over hot ovens, forced to make pizzas under what one officer called “sweatshop conditions.”

“It was really hot in there, like 10,000 degrees. I could see the heat waves coming off the ovens,” said an officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, for fear of retaliation from the notorious South Oakland pizza mafia. “They had kids crowded into a tiny room, forced to chop vegetables for hours.”

While police recovered mushrooms, peppers and onions from the work area, they didn’t apprehend any of the sweatshop’s owners.

“We tried to chase them, but they fled out the back,” said one Pitt cop on the scene. “All we found was a trail of tomato sauce.”

The shop’s owners would not return repeated phone calls or e-mails, and no one who worked at the shop would comment. But one student who said that he’d previously been employed at the shop confirmed the officers’ report.

“We’d work really long shifts, from when the bars opened to last call,” he said, referring to the shop’s clientele of heavy drinkers. “We didn’t even have dental. Just endless amounts of dough to roll out.”

After trying to organize the pizza workers, the student, a junior philosophy major, was fired.

“Now I’m with the Pathfinders. We get to go outside and everything,” he said.

Last Friday’s raid was by no means the first sweatshop bust in South Oakland. Many might remember last year’s investigation into courier services, which were forcing students to walk for miles in wet conditions. The ongoing inquiry into the epidemic of wet-sock-related foot fungus resulted in two arrests.

In response to Friday’s raid, some students are trying to organize, petitioning Pittsburgh to close down the sweatshops that employ so many students.

“These kids have to take classes and stuff. It’s bad enough that they live in slums, but making them work in these conditions is just criminal,” said the president of the student-organizing group Campus in Continuity.

CIC just launched its campaign to end student labor in Oakland. At a speak-out the Saturday after the raid, one dread-locked member asserted that their movement was on behalf of the students’ health. “Some of these kids are just 18 and 19, still coming up in the world. We shouldn’t put them in dangerous environments, like near hot things.”

Armed with buttons and shirts, CIC plans to table at Schenley and other areas frequented by students. One CIC officer, who identified himself only as “Wolf-child,” could not provide conclusive answers concerning where the T-shirts with the “Keep Oakland fresh, no more sweatshops” slogan were manufactured.

“Where are they from?” he repeated. “Uh, Honduras, I think. That’s one of those middle ones, right? Well, whatever. They were cheap.”