Jul
23
A report from students gathered in New York City:
If a magazine called Working Mother was awarding a corporation for how it treats women workers, wouldn’t you think they’d want to hear from the real-life working mothers leading a high-profile, international fight against the awardee’s sub-poverty wages and fierce crackdown on workers who speak up? Yep, so did we.
Unfortunately, these women workers never received their invitation to the $600-a-plate Awards Luncheon, and we don’t imagine that they were lost in the mail.
On Wednesday, hundreds of high-ranking corporate executives gathered in NYC to award some of the most notorious worker rights abusers across industries, including the food-service Goliath, Sodexo. Students representing eleven USAS affiliates from across the country, from the University of Washington to the University of Wisconsin, convened in New York to make sure the stories of those moms could not be ignored.
Check out the video to see Working Mother’s private security responding with some serious physical force.
What’s wrong with Sodexo?
Just last week, MSNBC highlighted a Colombian worker who was threatened his tongue would be cut out after he raised concerns to his Sodexo bosses. From our campus cafeterias to a gold mine in the Dominican Republic to countless other workplaces, Sodexo is cracking down fiercely on workers who speak out against sub-poverty wages, sweatshop conditions and disregard for their rights.
Sodexo’s “corporate social responsibility” song-and-dance has gone on long enough, and it’s time for Working Mother to stop aiding and abetting the deception. When students and workers speak out on our campuses, Sodexo responds by waving around these awards instead of addressing the real issues at hand. For example, when a dean at one southern California college raised questions about Sodexo’s practices, check out how how Sodexo District Manager Diane Keate tried to “set the record straight.” Her letter begins:
As District Manager I am happy to respond to the questions posed by your student and to set the record straight.
Sodexo has approximately 380,000 employees at over 30,000 sites in 80 countries, and provides more than 120,000 jobs at 6,000 locations throughout the U.S. Sodexo is proud to lead its industry in providing competitive wages and benefits, and has been recognized by Working Mother Magazine for two consecutive years as one of the best employers for hourly workers. The award took into account Sodexo’s overall workforce composition, benefits, training, development and advancement programs, child care, flexibility programs, and paid time off, among other considerations. [Emphasis added.]
Working Mother is allowing corporations to make a mockery of the very serious issues faced by women of color at work. Their awards allow corporations to make misleading claims about workplace conditions and diversity, while they squeeze low-income women of color for every nickel and dime they can get. It’s a slap in the face to all the women of color who have risked their lives and reputations fighting for justice.
Worse yet, check out this outrageous conflict of interest: Sodexo sits on the board that decides who gets Working Mother‘s awards, called Corporate Voices for Working Families, and also advertises in the magazine. As if the award wasn’t bogus enough already, this really puts it over the top!
Students are sick and tired of Sodexo trying to hide behind an award with so little credibility and relevance. Sodexo workers and their families deserve better.
You call that “methodology”?
It just gets weirder the more we dig in. Apparently Working Mother believes that it is right to award companies that are forced to pay millions of dollars in class-action lawsuits and settlements to women they have discriminated against, including Dell and California Verizon (no joke – it’s right in their methodology!). Students and workers can’t seem to understand why a magazine would praise a company that needed to be threatened with judicial action to finally treat their female employees fairly.
According to their “methodology”, when awarding companies Working Mother just considers the number of high-paying women executives that are in the ranks and any written policies the company may have, based on surveys filled out by management, rather than hearing from workers in interviews or through testimonials to talk about their true experiences working for these companies. That’s a surefire recipe for some one-sided information!
We’ve seen this before. Some call it “greenwashing”. For years, instead of heeding the demands of activists for labor, racial and environmental justice, big corporations have birthed a byzantine web of meaningless front groups, policies, rankings, think tanks, and anything else they can dream up. Anything, that is, besides actually changing how they do business in any fundamental way, to ensure the well-being of people comes before maximizing their profits.
As a little case study, here’s a relevant section of a letter USAS activists wrote this spring to confront the propaganda Sodexo executives send our universities’ administrators:
Additionally, Sodexo made the perplexing argument that the findings of independent human rights watchdog TransAfrica Forum’s investigations are somehow outweighed by the fact that Sodexo has been mentioned in a number of “Best Of” lists in industry magazines, some that Sodexo itself sponsors. Your company states, “Objective third parties who have scrutinized Sodexo have confirmed Sodexo’s commitments in North America and abroad to doing business in a responsible and ethical manner,” and lists rankings in the magazines Working Mother, Fortune and Diversity Inc, and a ranking by Ethisphere. Two minutes of internet searches reveals these rankings are anything but objective third parties:
The Working Mother ranking only takes into account 114,749 Sodexo workers in the United States and none overseas, making this award completely irrelevant to the issues at hand. Also, Sodexo is a “Corporate Partner” of the group that helpedWorking Mother pick the companies for the magazine’s rankings, a clear conflict of interest. Also, this ranking is oddly mentioned twice in Sodexo’s statement as if to make the list of awards seem longer.
The Fortune ranking cited has nothing to do with worker rights or human rights at all, but is simply a survey for which the magazine “asked businesspeople to vote for the companies that they admired most,” making this ranking also completely irrelevant.
Sodexo is listed as a sponsor of Diversity Inc right next to the magazine’s “Top 50” listing, creating an obvious conflict of interest.
Sodexo is a “Significant Sponsor” of Ethisphere, and a report by Slate specifically discredited these rankings due to conflict of interest.
Does Sodexo expect university officials to believe that these irrelevant and dubious magazine rankings somehow discredit the findings of TransAfrica Forum, an independent human rights organization widely renowned for its role in ending South African apartheid? Universities want answers, not smoke and mirrors.
Too high a price to be heard
Well in advance of the conference, we reached out to Working Mother and offered to organize an educational panel featuring low-income working moms who’d been affected by the awarded companies, in order to provide a more balanced perspective. At first they ignored our messaged.
Finally one of us spoke to Jennifer Owens, Editorial Director of Working Mother Magazine, who refused to allow those working moms space to share their stories. Instead, Owens made the jaw-dropping proposition that these women were welcome to attend the conference as long as they could cough-up they $1,495 individual registration fee. (Out of touch, much?)
Students were disgusted not only that companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, JP Morgan Chase and Sodexo were being celebrated by Working Mother, but also by the complete disrespect for real hard-working moms who are just trying to make a decent life for their families.
Want to get involved in kicking corporate greed off your campus?
Join the student movement that demands respect for working people, corporate accountability and economic justice! E-mail email hidden; JavaScript is required, check out the Facebook page and we’ll see you in the streets!
