Students, workers rally to cancel food-service contract

<www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2003/February/15/local/stories/04local.htm>

February 15, 2003
By JONDI GUMZ
Sentinel staff writer

Ruth Martinez, 34, makes $10.05 an hour after working in food services for 10 years at UC Santa Cruz.
The mother of three works full time but can’t afford family health insurance, which costs more than $50 a week.
Constancio Gonzalez, 42, makes $12 an hour after working in food services for eight years at UC Berkeley. He gets full health benefits.
The difference is Gonzalez works for the university. Martinez works for a subcontractor, Sodexho.
That’s why UCSC students have started a campaign to dump Sodexho, the global hospitality company which has a campus contract through June 2004.
More than 125 people students, food-service workers and union employees rallied outside McHenry Library at noon Friday. Campaign leaders presented administrators with petitions signed by more than 2,400 students. Their demands include:
Cancel the Sodexho contract by June.
Provide food services in-house and make workers university employees.
Allow existing employees to keep their seniority.
Set up a committee of students and employees to help guide the new food service program.
Sodexho’s regional office did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Jean Marie Scott, who oversees housing and dining services, said Vice Chancellor Francisco Hernandez met with students Wednesday on their concerns.
Scott said campus administrators had planned to spend a year developing a master plan for all of the food services, including the dining halls, coffee carts, and the newly opened University Center. At the end of that review, a decision would be made on whether to contract for services or operate in-house.
She said the review is not part of the five-month campus initiative to evaluate procedures for cost-cutting and efficiency.
Hernandez was off campus Friday, but Ryan Marenger said he had agreed to contact officials at UCLA and UC Berkeley, which have in-house food services.
“All but two of the nine UC campuses directly employ their food-service workers,” said Jakob Schiller, a senior American-studies major active in the campaign. “At those campuses, workers receive higher wages and better benefits.”
Students said they found meals cost less at UC Berkeley, where food service workers are unionized, than at UCSC, where Sodexho workers are not union members. They said the annual cost of 19 meals a week is $2,202 at UCSC and $2,170 at UC Berkeley.
They also said UCSC would not be the first to end a food-service contract.
“Harvard and Yale have done it,” said sophomore Sandi Gutstein, a member of Students for Labor Solidarity. “We can do it, too.”
Martinez, who spoke Spanish with her words translated to the crowd, asked for the community’s support.
“We can’t win without you,” she said. “A lot of workers are afraid to speak up. I’m doing this for myself and for my co-workers.”
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Contact Jondi Gumz at jgumz (at) santa-cruz.com.
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Sodexho
WHAT: World’s leading provider of food and management services; new division specializes in prison management in Britain; 8-year contract signed with U.S. Marine Corps last October.
WHERE: Founded in 1966 in Marseilles, France, by Chairman and CEO Pierre Bellon.
EMPLOYEES: 315,000 in 74 countries, with an estimated 300 at UCSC.
ANNUAL SALES: 12.6 billion Euro.