President Angel,
As you may or may not be aware, Sodexo employees on Clark’s campus announced this morning that they will be striking in the near future and demanding Sodexo’s recognition of a card-check election process, better wages and benefits, and more respect from management, among other things. This event represents a steady progression of unresolved and largely unaddressed issues faced by workers on campus that became public last winter but began long before.
Workers’ problems relating to wages (eg. making less than $10 after more than ten years at Clark even when new hires make $12), benefits (eg. one third of a paycheck going to employer-provided health-care),scheduling (eg. cashiers’ hours being cut while new hires arrive), respect from management (eg. being loudly scolded in front of students and co-workers for a minor error), and favoritism (eg. wage discrepancies for people doing the same job and an all-white management team) have been further compounded by Sodexo’s intimidation and manipulation of workers, particularly pro-union ones (eg. interrupting union meetings, telling workers voting for a union is “signing yourself away” and that they will have to pay for their shoes after getting a union contract). Furthermore, Sodexo has a well-documented history of anti-union policies and tactics (see article: “A Strange Case”, published by Human Rights Watch), as well as an easily observable practice of offering the cheapest contracts due to lower wages and benefits. These problems are ongoing, real, and serious on campus, and so far, save for a guarantee of fall rehire and a letter not even originally intended for any Sodexo employees, nothing public and concrete has been done by Clark to address them.
It has been nearly eight months since these issues were drawn to your attention and a clear set of requests were first brought to you by the Clark Community (refer to Clark UNITE!’s letter of 2/22/10, corresponding student and faculty petitions, and a Labor Code of Conduct). As members of this community, with many of us financing Sodexo’s operations on campus, we are firmly requesting that you immediately take the following steps towards resolutely supporting and ensuring labor rights and dignity for all campus workers, outsourced or not.
1.) Publicly demand that Sodexo, as your subcontractor, accept whatever method of unionization its employees democratically choose, as stipulated in the Labor Code of Conduct.
2.) Organize a meeting between non-management employees working on Clark’s campus, students, faculty and the Clark Administration and Clark’s legal adviser or lawyer to finalize and implement a Labor Code of Conduct within 2 weeks. The meeting should be open to the rest of the Clark Community (see attached contract language regarding labor standards as a supplement to the Labor Code of Conduct topics).
3.) Involve the Clark students and faculty in discussions pertaining to contracts with private firms. Ensure the transparency and accountability of Clark University’s contracts with private firms (including financial information) by making contract-related information open to the public. No serious discussions about where our money is going or how to regulate outsourced operations can take place without knowledge of contract terms and language. In addition, Clark should follow the method of social auditing as used by socially responsible enterprises around the world and audit Sodexo.
4.) The position of a Campus Ombudsman or an equivalent third party committee must be created and institutionalized through policy in order to ensure that issues between employees and their bosses, be they Clark, Sodexo, or employees of another organization, are addressed through an avenue and process run by a third party professional yet empowered by the Clark Administration (see the letter Requesting the Appointment of an Ombudsman). Contracts should be evaluated by the Ombudsman.
5.) Halt any process of creating a policy limiting protesting and free speech on campus. If threatened with sanctions for demonstrating peacefully, we will immediately contact both the media and American Civil Liberties Union.
We expect that your actions will reflect the urgency felt by those workers who have made the serious choice to strike, as well as the urgency of any other situation dealing with human rights violations. Workers now feel that their best path involves putting their livelihoods on the line, and it is our clear duty, as members of the community, to respect their legitimate grievances and push all the more firmly for a real, equitable solution.
We hope to hear a response from you or a representative by the end of Monday the 18th of October, 2010.
Thank you for your time,
Clark Unite!
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So it's been a while since I harassed you guys. I'd just like to point out that everyone on campus is sick of your protesting. You interrupt our classes, our meals and our sleep, and that doesn't make anyone want to fight for rights. It just pisses them off. We all hope you understand how puerile your methods of protesting are, and how undergrad students, grad students, and faculty all dislike you. Stop being the blemish on this campus.
ReplyDeleteOrganizational Ombuds are a common feature at colleges and universities. (There are more than 300 Ombuds offices in higher education in North America.) These Ombuds work to ensure fair and equitable resolution of campus conflicts by practicing to the ethical tenets of confidentiality, independence, neutrality and informality. They do not, however, evaluate contracts. More details are available from the International Ombudsman Association (http://www.ombudsassociation.org/).
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