For years, Pipe Dream has extensively covered Sodexo’s systemic managerial corruption, borderline-extortionist machinations against its clients and horrendous treatment of its employees.

But nothing seems to have changed; Sodexo remains an unabashed, unrepentant epitome of corporate greed at the cost of those who work for it and those for whom it works.

The company, a France-based multinational corporation, is one of the biggest companies in the food-services category; its revenue reached $19 billion for the fiscal year of 2009.

Yet at the same time, as it grows, its pervasive abuses against its employees continue.

Entry-level employees make minimum wage and, even after working for the company for years, can only expect to earn about $10.50 an hour.

On average, employees make between $12-15,000 a year ‘ and consequently live on or below the federal poverty line.

As past articles have documented, workers live paycheck to paycheck, maybe scrape together enough for a Christmas or two, but mostly just struggle to put food on the table. According to Pipe Dream, one worker estimated in 2008 that between 60 and 75 percent of Sodexo workers are forced to visit soup kitchens or charities to survive.

As if their annual salary in 2008 didn’t force them to desperation already, in a series of negotiations around 2008 Sodexo demanded that its employees contribute $120 per pay period toward company health insurance ‘ a cost that eats up to 25 percent of a worker’s paycheck.

But their menial paycheck is not the extent of the abuse to which Sodexo perpetrates on its workers. Past interviews with employees have documented routine intimidation, overburdening and lack of sympathy for employees by management.

In addition, Sodexo actively undermines the formation of unions. A recent report on the company by Human Rights Watch concluded that Sodexo ‘threatened, interrogated and fired workers who tried to form a union.’

The most galling part of Sodexo’s treatment of its workers is that, as it perpetuates a grinding cycle of poverty and hunger for its employees, it has the nerve to claim it is fighting to end poverty and hunger. On its charity website, www.sodexofoundation.org, it says its mission is to ‘create a hunger-free nation’ and ‘fight poverty, unemployment, and educational disparities.’

The irony there is as obvious as it is sickening: Sodexo purports to be committed to fighting hunger as it continues to pay its employees so little that they are forced to go to soup kitchens.

I’m no economics major, but I can tell this much: When Sodexo is making $19 billion a year, and its founding family, the Bellons, are making about $87.5 million off annual dividends directly from the company, surely the company can afford to pay its employees enough that every day is not a struggle for them to keep a roof over their heads.

But more shocking than Sodexo’s track record is Binghamton’s steady renewal of the company’s contract; the newest one ensures that the same blue-shirted servers will be there behind the counters, dishing out a different variety of the same gastronomic disaster, until 2015.

The contract, signed in 2005, is a sad example of the University setting aside principle for cheaper contracting (on its end, not ours ‘ Sodexo’s blatant overcharging of students was covered in Matt Magnani’s March 9 column, ‘Sodexo Fees are in Bad Taste’).

What kind of a message is Binghamton sending? ‘Well, we know Sodexo routinely busts unions, mistreats its employees and provides barely-adequate service, but we’d rather pay less!’

For an institution that presumably endeavors not only to provide us with an education but with an understanding of social justice, the discarding of morals in favor of cutting the budget ‘ and the consequent renewal of Sodexo’s contract ‘ is vastly more unappetizing than whatever you’ll find on your plate on your next trip to the dining hall.