May
24
Originally posted in the University of Washington Daily
‘This is the war we’ve given them’
By Lauren Kronebusch - May 24, 2011
Scott Woodward’s assistant is tall, lean and sports a neon-striped, rectangular-shaped backpack. She types on her computer, situated kitty-corner facing the door of Woodward’s office. In between spurts of typing, she picks up her iPhone, sheathed in a pink cover — a sort of odd, ironic reminder of the debate about labor organizing that is taking place in her office today. Close to 5 p.m., she quietly shuts down the computer, picks up her biking backpack and squeezes silently past the students lining the already cramped doorway. There are about 20 students in Room 235 of Graves Hall.
For two hours, Scott Woodward’s assistant will be one of the few people to leave Graves Hall.
The 20 students who have crowded into Room 235 are members of the Kick Out Sodexo Coalition, a coalition spearheaded in October 2010 by the group United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). USAS is a national organization with chapters at universities across the United States. The universities that are coordinating the Kick Out Sodexo campaign include Emory University, Georgia Tech, Ohio State University, George Mason University and, until recently, Western Washington University. The coalition is attempting to persuade the UW’s administration to sever its nearly 20-year, $3.4 million contract as a provider of concessions for the university based on allegations of human-rights abuses and union-busting in five countries throughout the world.
The coalition was brought abruptly to the community’s attention with the arrest of 25 UW students May 11. A week later on May 19, 20 different students took the same stance inside the office of Scott Woodward, the UW’s director of athletics.
“We don’t like the way you do business”
It’s past 3:30 p.m. and the marchers seem to be all assembled. Those who are not marching with the group stand or sit in Red Square while listening to the chants and the speeches of the coalition’s members. Reverend Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist Church in Seattle has prepared a speech to begin the march. He stands in his white ecclesiastical robe, oddly contrasting with the megaphone he holds close to his mouth. Lang brings a sort of chilling feel to the rally. When he speaks, there are few interjections by the crowd besides cheers of support every now and then.
“This is the war we’ve given them, this is the mess that we’ve made. And now, with thanks, you are rising up against the sins of your fathers and mothers, you’re rising up, demanding a new moral excellence, a new moral covenant, a new moral solidarity so that all may survive and thrive. You insisted through words and actions that might have integrity. 25 of you put your bodies and reputations on the line, trying to help Phyllis become wise.”
After a long “ooh” at this last comment, and a few more words by Lang and other members, the march begins its swift progression toward Graves Hall. The first chant rings out: “Hey hey, ho ho. Sodexo has got to go. Hey hey, ho ho. Sodexo has got to go.”
The coalition, composed of 19 campus student groups, have come a long way to reach this point.
Throughout the sit-in, students beat out various chants, some written on the spur of the moment, some preprepared. Only a few feet away in the crowded office is a fax machine that continues to churn out faxes from supporters of the protest from across the nation addressed to Woodward.
At 5 p.m., there are about 53 faxes collected in a rough pile on Woodward’s desk.
At 5:20 p.m., there are about 70 faxes.
At 5:35 p.m., there are 85.
Atop the desk is a paper box filled with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Clif bars.
It’s easy to forget among this mess, in this crowded room, that the work these students do is outside of their school work, outside of their daily obligations. However, Katy Lundgren, a member of the coalition since its inception, feels that’s exactly what motivates her to keep going.
“It takes a lot of energy, and it takes a lot of attention to make sure that I’m taking care of myself … and I do make sure to keep school as a priority because I am a student, and that’s my primary job here,” Lundgren said. “But while I’m a student, I need to use the power that I have as a student to produce change.”
Allie Padgett, a UW student who has been a member of USAS and the coalition since the campaign’s beginnings in October, seems to be motivated by the same power that Lundgren describes.
“Students went to Sodexo and said, ‘We don’t like the way you do business,’” Padgett said. “They have no motivation to change, because we’re just a couple of students. But if you get a university, a client to go to the company and say, ‘We don’t like the way you do business,’ then suddenly that company has a reason to care.”
Lundgren also describes past protests that have inspired and influenced the Kick Out Sodexo coalition.
“In the ’80s, ending apartheid was due in large part to a collective divestment from universities across the country in South Africa,” Lundgren said. “A more recent movement that happened just a few years ago was collective divestment from Russell Athletic that resulted in the rehiring of workers that had been fired at two Honduras factories and the recognition of [a union there]. The Russell victory changed the face of the apparel industry, and the food service industry just really could be changed by Sodexo changing.”
“We presented all of the evidence that supports the contract cut”
Morgan Currier, a sophomore at the UW and a prospective law, societies and justice (LSJ) major, has been a primary organizer for the campaign since its birth in October and has helped forge a path for the coalition’s actions since then. After learning of the UW’s contract with Sodexo, a multinational cooperation headquartered in France, and of the allegations of human-rights violations at Sodexo’s worksites around the world, the coalition began forming a plan to address Interim President Phyllis Wise.
“The group got on board with [the research] and started conversations with President Wise, encouraging her to investigate and really highly consider not doing business with this company, because they don’t share the same values as our university if they continue to mistreat their workers,” Currier said.
Currier and a few other students proceeded with their own investigation into the allegations, traveling to the Dominican Republic to visit Barrick Gold Mine, where Sodexo provided concessions.
“[We] spoke to workers there, one of which … is Carina [Mieses],” Currier said. “She was fired for speaking up [about] wanting to be a part of a union. She was telling us all of the things that were going on down there that were just really, really terrible. From that investigation, I really learned a lot.”
Currier admits that her own advice to Sodexo’s management at the site did not produce much. But she did get the material to start campaigning on campus.
“As soon as students learn about Sodexo and their violations, they get on board,” Currier said. “So now, we have this coalition of 20 student groups that are behind this termination.”
Padgett said she “got pretty involved pretty quickly.” The next step, Padgett described, was handing out fliers at a UW football game in an attempt to educate students about Sodexo at the roots of the fight: UW athletic events.
“Once people started finding out about that, people started getting upset,” Padgett said. “People wanted to know what was going on to get rid of them and how the campaign was going.”
Before the first sit-in, perhaps the largest step taken by the coalition was in April at its Truth Trial, the last stop in USAS’s national Truth Tour. Lundgren described the Truth Trial as a way to educate not just UW students, but also the larger community surrounding the university about the group’s fight. Carina Mieses, an ex-Sodexo worker from the Dominican Republic, traveled to Seattle to speak at the event.
“[She came] here to speak about her experience working with Sodexo, being fired for organizing a 45-minute work stoppage to try to get better pay, to try to get pay that had not been given for work that had been done for the workers there,” Lundgren said. “She came here to talk about that and trying to get an independent union recognized in her workplace there (in the Dominican Republic). She spoke, and we Skyped in with worker Marsha from Ohio State University, who also experienced poor treatment by Sodexo.”
Kick Out Sodexo also presented two reports that document the company’s human-rights abuses as well as spoke on the university contract’s “Termination without Cause” clause, which states that either party may terminate the contract without cause by giving 90-days notice.
“We presented all of the evidence that supports the contract cut,” Lundgren said. “And a board of five community leaders, two professors and three leaders from the communities, looked at the evidence and made a recommendation. The recommendation they made was to Wise, to the administration, to cut the contract. But we were presenting to educate the community on this issue because it’s something that they should be aware of. So it was for the public.”
Wise was invited but did not appear at the public event.
With these actions taken, with the support of several other universities across campus, and with the memory of the events at Emory University this April — a protest that resulted in at least six student arrests by Emory police but no contract cut — Currier says the May 19 rally was not planned but was something that the group felt they had to do after the student arrests one week earlier.
“These actions, over the past week and this week, [are] something that we feel like we’ve been forced into,” Currier said. “We hope that we can just have a dialogue over a long period of time and really work out our demands with the administration. Unfortunately, because of their lack of response, it’s become that we need to put ourselves in these situations, and we plan them as we go.”
“It was a report on violations of workers’ organizing and bargaining rights”
The Kick Out Sodexo Coalition cites five sources from which it draws its accusations of human-rights abuses. The first is Currier’s visit to the Dominican Republic. The second was a report by Angelina Godoy, a UW assistant professor of LSJ and director of the UW Center for Human Rights, on a Sodexo site in Columbia. The third, a National Labor Relations Board decision to charge Sodexo for violating U.S. labor laws in a case involving Tulane and Loyola universities. The last two major sources included a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), an international nongovernmental organization based in New York City, and TransAfrica Forum, an organization devoted to bringing social justice issues surrounding African nations and the African diaspora to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy.
Lance Compa, a senior lecturer in the department of labor relations, law and history at Cornell University, co-wrote the HRW report, which was published in September 2010.
“It was a report on violations of workers’ organizing and bargaining rights in the United States by European multinational firms,” Compa wrote. “Sodexo was one case study that included another French company (Saint-Gobain), three German companies, two U.K. firms, a Dutch and a Norwegian company.”
While the TransAfrica report focuses on human-rights abuses as defined under international law, the report written by Compa references Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), passed by Congress in 1935. Section 7 defines employees’ right to organize.
It states that “Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
Section 8(a) of the NLRA defines “unfair labor practices” as “including interference, restraint or coercion of employees in the exercise of Section 7 rights, discrimination against workers who exercise those rights and refusal to bargain with workers’ chosen representative.”
The HRW report publishes research on three different work sites within the United States, in Phoenix, West Orange, N.J., and Easton, Penn.
“This report was part of a long-standing Human Rights Watch project on workers’ rights in the United States, starting with the ‘Unfair Advantage’ report that I wrote 10 years ago, followed by reports on the meat-packing industry and on Wal-Mart,” Compa wrote.
Despite the Group Human Rights policy that Sodexo adopted in 2009, Compa and HRW reported that Sodexo’s managers lead “aggressive campaigns against some of its U.S. employees’ efforts to form unions and bargain collectively,” including firing union supporters, “demanding that workers sign an anti-union petition, interrogating workers about their union activity, and telling workers that their organizing efforts were under surveillance”.
Under the NLRA, employees are granted the protection of federal law should they decide to organize. In response to the allegations by HRW that Sodexo engaged in unlawful anti-union measures, Sodexo North America CEO George Chavel responded in a five-page letter to the organization that “these two matters (at Plattsburgh State University in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Phoenix) involve isolated and exceptional occurrences more than five years ago” and that Sodexo’s subsequent resolution of those problems “reflects a strong corporate commitment to applicable laws and our employees’ rights.”
The TransAfrica Forum report, “Voices for change: Sodexo workers from five countries speak out,” recounts the experiences of Sodexo employees from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guinea, Morocco and the United States, describing the specific human-rights abuses the coalition frequently cites. These human-rights abuses include poverty wages, forced pregnancy tests, unpaid work, anti-union behavior by managers and unsafe working conditions.
The report concludes that “through the effective monitoring and enforcement of national laws within the countries it operates,” Sodexo employees might be offered more protection and “ensure workers have access to the most efficient, effective means of creating and enforcing appropriate standards that comply with established global codes for human and labor rights.” However, Norm Arkans, UW associate vice president of media relations and communications, has said the university needs to undertake more research to determine whether the human-rights violations are valid.
“These two reports [from TransAfrica and Human Rights Watch] that have been cited, one of them, the Human Rights Watch, deals with foreign companies doing business in the United States — doesn’t even address Third World issues at all,” Arkans said. “The TransAfrica forum was based exclusively on interviews with workers from five countries compared to the 80 that Sodexo does business in.”
Arkans said this extra research is part of the “due diligence” the university owes to Sodexo as a business partner.
The sacrifice the university is not willing to make, Eric Godfrey, UW vice president and vice provost for Student Life, said was taking police officers away from obligations elsewhere. The research would be undertaken in the summer with the students present, but for now, the coalition would need to wait for that time.
“That’s a tradeoff that we’re not willing to make, that there’s a larger institutional concern at that point,” Godfrey said. “We welcome students to express their views and we always have, that will not change, but when those behaviors bump up against some of the things that I’ve talked about, then it becomes more problematic.”
“We’re going to continue to put pressure on Wise”
Thirteen of the 20 students involved in Thursday’s sit-in were arrested for trespassing under Washington RCW 9A.52.070, criminal trespass in the first degree. After the students were processed, cited and escorted out of the building by UWPD officers, they still pledged that their fight was not over and that they would continue to push Wise and the administration until the contract was cut.
“We’re going to continue to put pressure on Wise,” Padgett said. “The campus community needs their voices heard on this issue. And we’re just hoping that President Wise sees how strongly the community feels about this and how passionate people are surrounding this issue.”
As the students were lined up one by one along the narrow hallway leading to Room 235, the students’ chants could still be heard, becoming softer and softer as the room emptied.
“Wise, step off it. The people over profit. Wise, step off it. The people over profit.”
Reach reporter Lauren Kronebusch at email hidden; JavaScript is required.
TIMELINE:
Protesting Sodexo
Sept. 2, 2010
Human Rights Watch released a report that cited human-rights abuses in the Sodexo corporation.
Nov. 5, 2010
UW Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) sent a letter to UW Interim President Phyllis Wise, requesting that the UW terminate its contract with Sodexo.
Nov. 12, 2010
SLAP members staged a protest outside Gerberding Hall and gave Wise a boot-shaped petition with about 50 names, which asked that the university immediately cut its contract with Sodexo.
Nov. 22, 2010
Wise sent a letter to SLAP refusing the request that UW’s contract with Sodexo be terminated.
Dec. 13, 2010
Wise met with students to discuss potential actions.
January 2011
UW SLAP changed its name to the UW United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS).
Jan. 3, 2011
Wise sent a letter to George Chavel, president and CEO of Sodexo, addressing student concerns.
Jan. 19, 2011
The TransAfrica forum released a report saying that “Sodexo’s code of conduct will likely continue to fall short without a consistent, long-term mechanism for ensuring successful implementation at the worksite.”
Jan. 21, 2011
UW USAS members protested at the National Food Service Conference in Haggett Hall. UW Police Department officers were called, but no arrests were made.
Feb. 24, 2011
UW USAS collaborated with 17 student groups to create the UW Kick Out Sodexo Coalition.
May 11, 2011
UW Kick Out Sodexo members occupied the offices of Wise for more than six hours. Twenty-five students were arrested, cited with criminal trespass and released.
May 19, 2011
UW Kick Out Sodexo members staged a three-hour sit-in in athletic director Scott Woodward’s office. The protest ended in 13 arrests.
May 24, 2011
UW Kick Out Sodexo members and UW administration will meet with Sodexo executives to discuss allegations against Sodexo.
