Across the United States, workers’ rights campaigns are working to obtain living wages and basic human benefits for workers in previously marginalized industries. Service sector employees have successfully brought the issues of poverty wages, healthcare, pensions and wage theft into the public discourse. Their efforts helped rectify many of the long-practiced corporate abuses of employees.
This fight for economic justice extends to college campuses, as a number of labor unions have sought to organize collegiate food service providers. Binghamton University must come together as a community and join this effort by supporting the rights of Sodexo employees.
Sodexo carries a long legacy of worker oppression. Through means of intimidation, misinformation and coercion, Sodexo denied many of its workers the right to form a union. To this day, Sodexo offers its employees low wages and few benefits. Ezra Shapiro’s 2010 column, “Sodexploitation and Binghamton,” provides an excellent account of Sodexo’s exploitative tendencies and hypocrisy. In 2014, the problems mentioned in Shapiro’s column continue to persist. The administration even supported the expansion of Sodexo’s operations into the BU Marketplace. Clearly, we cannot depend on the sympathy and benevolence of the administration to break ties with the company nor is this necessarily the most effective means of achieving economic justice for our workers.
While breaking ties with the private contractor is a legitimate option, it should only be done if each and every worker affected is guaranteed a job and benefits under new management. This outcome is highly unlikely given the close relationship between the company and Binghamton’s administration. While creating public jobs at the University is a worthy long-term goal, ensuring economic security and justice for workers is a more pressing area of concern.
The Service Employees International Union and UNITE HERE are two national unions that actively fight to organize and protect Sodexo workers throughout the country. UNITE HERE runs a student outreach campaign through which they work to unite students and workers in the struggle for “Real Food and Real Jobs.” The organization exposes the injustices that campus food workers face by compiling statistics on rates of poverty, lack of benefits and, even more strikingly, food insecurity. According to UNITE HERE’s website, 22 percent of workers in food preparation and serving-related occupations live in food insecure households, 31 percent of food workers are at risk for diet-related illnesses, and an abnormally high amount of food workers are forced to rely on federal nutritional assistance programs to supplement their income. We, as a community, should not countenance the blatant absurdity that those who prepare our food lack the income to provide themselves with an adequate, healthy diet.
Working to ensure fair and sustainable employment for Sodexo workers would also help us improve the sustainability and safety of our food. Food workers have a unique capacity to monitor the sources and quality of our food options. But without adequate protections, workers could be fired for speaking out about unethical or ignorant practices. In addition, if we provided fresh, local ingredients to our workers, many of whom have extensive culinary training, the quality and sustainability of our campus food services would be increased, providing a much-needed boost to our local economy.
We can no longer allow our talented staff to be devalued and mistreated. Whether by dissolving the University’s connection to for-profit contractors or by working to change employee-employer relations, we must commit to a sustainable, ethical and just food system for our campus. Worker-student solidarity will be essential in efforts to improve dining, fight against privatization of our services and end the mistreatment of workers and students on campus and in the local community.