Workers, students fight Sodexo

Food service and laundry workers, student organizers and Workers United of the Service Employees union descended upon Atlanta the week of Aug. 9 to culminate a summer-long program aimed at pressuring food service giant Sodexo to agree to a global card check agreement.

Rally supports Sodexo workers. Photo: Roger Sikes

Sodexo is a global union-busting food service subcontractor that employs more than 120,000 workers in the United States at universities, schools, prisons and hospitals. These jobs typically don’t provide affordable health care, incomes above the federal poverty level, or skill development in the workplace, especially for workers of color.

Students from universities in more than 10 states have been working alongside the Sodexo cafeteria workers at their schools in a program called the SEIU Summer Brigade. Attempting to build organizational infrastructure for the coming school year, this work included outreach to workers previously uninvolved with the campaign; building political support with local progressive politicians; and engaging community groups to hold universities accountable to their socially responsible rhetoric and to pressure Sodexo into a card check neutrality agreement.

Atlanta is a hub for the Sodexo campaign because of the large number of universities involved, including Morehouse College, Emory University, Clark Atlanta University, Georgia State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

On Aug. 12 the group of more than 350 local and national supporters rallied outside of Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black university, to support the Sodexo workers who went public with the campaign there for the first time. The protesters then broke up into smaller groups and dispersed throughout the historic West End community of Atlanta, to engage community members in dialogue regarding the lack of good jobs in the community and the impact of international employers like Sodexo on their neighborhoods and families.

Participants reunited at Mount Moriah Baptist Church for a town hall meeting where workers and students shared their stories with one state senator, two members of Congress and one City Council member. The politicians pledged to meet with university presidents, to “work a day in the shoes” of a Sodexo worker and to launch an investigation into Sodexo’s labor practices and its role in the community.

The national backbone of support coupled with grassroots community organizing in Atlanta is key to building people power in the South. This campaign is focused in key Southern cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans and connects Southern workers and students to regions with traditionally stronger union and progressive movements.

The Sodexo campaign offers an opportunity for students and workers to unite at the national level. In recent history, campus labor struggles have been isolated to campuswide or citywide organizing. The nature of this campaign facilitates cross-campus and cross-state coordination, because pressure applied to any of Sodexo’s sites will impact a national or international bargaining agreement.

Students have leverage in this situation because it is the universities that hold the contracts with Sodexo. As customers and consumers it does not bode well for the university or Sodexo if students reject the current exploitative working conditions of subcontractors like Sodexo.

United Students Against Sweatshops is working to help coordinate a national student strategy that forces universities to hold subcontractors like Sodexo accountable to certain labor standards. If Sodexo is not willing to comply, then a different subcontractor will be brought in with restructured labor standards while ensuring that the current workers are rehired.