Sodexho employee Mary Barry, who worked here at UMass Boston, did not want to quit.
But after a company docks your pay when you leave a little early on Fridays for your cancer treatments (so you can be sick over the weekend and return for work Monday), after it moves you over to the Quinn Building when you want to remain with the students in the new Campus Center, after it removes the chairs you sat on at the cash register as an “operational decision,” would you want to stick around?
“More than 25 years in the UMass-Boston food court and cafeteria, and this is how Mary Barry retires,” reported Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory last week. “It’s the Sodexho USA way.”
Many on campus remember Mary Barry as an enjoyable person who made the Sodexho food seem a little more bearable, the ten minutes in the cafeteria a little brighter…and did we mention the food?
The treatment of Mary Barry, of course, is not the only questionable activity that the food service giant has allegedly engaged in. You may have noticed an increase in employee unhappiness and a higher turnover rate, especially with the move into the new cafeteria, which may not be surprising given the number of complaints throughout the United States at other universities.
The Northerner, the student newspaper at Northern Kentucky University, wrote earlier this year on a controversy over Sodexho ethics. At NKU and other campuses, the paper reported, “Employees have complained of long hours, some stretching to 14 hours without overtime, and vague job descriptions. One employee at NKU, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, gave the example of being told to operate the remote snack stations called Moveable Feasts for an hour, then being pulled off to do stock, then being put on the cash registers, then working behind the lunch counters.”
At New York’s Plattsburgh State University, the National Labor Relations Board charged Sodexho with one or more activities, as reported on PressRepublican.com: “interrogating employees about union activities; threatening them with loss of job benefits and saying bargaining would be futile if they unionized; telling workers they couldn’t talk about the union at work, while allowing them to talk about other non-work related matters; threatening employees with unspecified reprisals for talking to union organizers; and telling an employee she would be placed under house arrest for talking to the union.”
As The Wheel, the student newspaper at Atlanta’s Emory University noted in April, “Since December 1998, the National Labor Relations Board has received eight complaints from Sodexho employees…” adding, “[a]nother branch of the charges against Sodexho involves a class action lawsuit charging the company with setting a ‘glass ceiling’ and a ‘glass wall’ on the promotions of black employees.”
Sodexho needs to take steps to ensure what happened to Mary Barry never happens again to any employee. Keith Motley, who made funding union contracts a top priority when he became interim chancellor earlier this year and who clearly understands labor issues, should sit down and talk with the company.
A good first step: apologize to Mary Barry.