A Call for Living Wages
Posted on 23. Nov, 2009 by Michael Neil in Around Campus, Featured
Our tale begins in an eight by twelve foot cell…or, at least one strand of it does. Perhaps the room has a few windows. Perhaps it has only one. It could be in Texas, or maybe California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, or Tennessee. It might even be in our very own state of Colorado. Truthfully it doesn’t matter. For our purposes, all we need to know is that this cell sits in a prison owned and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private for profit prison company in the United States and, indeed, the world.
Our tale has another strand. It begins in 1994 in Paris, France. Sodexho Corporation, already an international facilities management giant, seeks to diversify beyond hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and the like. The prison system became a natural fit for the growing conglomerate and business was booming. Simultaneously, across the United States, Sodexho had bought out smaller collegiate food and janitorial services, such as Marriott, which in turn had consumed even smaller local progressive companies like SAGA. For a few years, little changed and the partnership proved fruitful. Within a few years, however, abuse, mismanagement, and even death hung over CCA like a dark storm cloud.
By 1999, campuses across America erupted against Sodexho, DU’s long-standing foodservice provider for all dining and catering on-campus. Sit-ins, demonstrations, and board meetings pushed Sodexho to rethink its “strategic partnership”. Reluctant to give up a hold on the booming private prison industry, Sodexho struggled against increased campus pressure, including a website called www.eyeonsodexho.com. Finally, college administrations across the country got the message out to Sodexho: divest from CCA or get out. In August 2001, Sodexho Inc. of the United States and Sodexho Alliance of Paris saw the writing on the wall and divested, according to www.allbusiness.com. Perhaps you think that this little trip down memory lane is a mere history lesson and that Sodexho’s hands are clean. That would be nice, but it would not be true. Here, as the late Paul Harvey might have said, is the rest of the story. And it is a story that continues to unfold on campuses across the United States.
On a cold winter’s day in late 2000, a group of ten or so students huddled in a vacant classroom in Colorado College’s Palmer Hall. Four had been instrumental in starting discussions with Sodexho about its connections with CCA, but now we had a greater mission. With our number eventually swelling to fourteen students, three professors, a couple of administrators, and an organizer from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, we set off to discover and document just how shabbily Sodexho’s cooking and janitorial staff were paid and treated at Colorado College.
We found that we had 110 Sodexho workers paid in an equilibrium seniority structure, starting at $7.00 and making an average of $8.10 an hour, working 35 hours per week, 40 weeks a year. We cut $.50 from their pay because we assumed that the college would spend, in the long run, $20 a week of compensation to pay for healthcare, etc., which they did not receive with Sodexho. At the time our study was written, the living wage was $12.89. Should we have decided to settle for less than a living wage, the Sodexho contract workers would also have fallen short.
There are many available standards to hold companies to, however because wages are the most measurable area in which labor standards can be applied, it is easiest to measure progress in these terms. The lowest standard usually is the poverty line, which is a federal measurement used to determine whether families qualify for some social assistance programs. Anyone paid less than $8.46 an hour is below the poverty line ($17,603 a year at 2000 figures). Another possible standard is provided by the Department of Labor under the Service Contract Act, which sets minimum wages for the federal government and its subcontractors. These standards are designed to prevent exploitation of low-paid workers and union avoidance through subcontracting. The Service Contract Act wage for janitors, for example, was $7.56. The next-lowest standard is usually the median or mean market wage. Market wages are determined by surveying corporations in a region asking what they pay for different types of work. The current prevailing wage for janitors in the Colorado Front Range for 2000 was s around $8.65 an hour.
We then examined comparable payment practices at such places as Pikes Peak Community College. According to our findings, in August 2000 (the latest year for which data is available) CC paid $6.92, compared to $7.71 at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, $8.06 at Pikes Peak Community College, and $9.45 at local elementary schools. Another survey taken in March 2000 states that the area wage for janitorial services is $8.65, and less than 10 percent of janitors were paid $7.55 or lower.
Furthermore, we found the janitors were vastly overworked. Each was required to clean 35,000 square feet, as compared to a national average of only 28,000. One worker complained, “I’m doing two people’s jobs, and not getting enough for one person.” One janitor was made to clean the entire Tutt Library, arriving at 4:30 in the morning to clean before the building opened (this person was assisted by temp workers from time to time, as will be discussed later.) Another worker notes being assigned an entire building to clean in just one hour. In order to maximize use of effective personnel, Sodexho transferred them from building to building, allowing some buildings to become dirty and then transferring in more experienced staff. For example, Chaplain Bruce Coriell objected to three attempts to transfer experienced janitors out of Shove Chapel. In the end, Sodexho claimed then that they were rotating all their janitors, and he conceded. However, in fact, only four janitors were moved. Not only did this mean more work for experienced janitors, it reduces overall cleanliness by preventing workers from gaining experience in the building they were cleaning.
Another issue in wage determination is unpaid labor: Sodexho janitors were required to train new employees and were not compensated for the time spent on this. Because of the high turnover rates and the use of temporary labor, this is a significant addition to the workload of a CC janitor. According to Karen Caccolice, a Sodexho manager, “this is not looked on as a burden”—in other words, the management does not pay workers for it. However, the workers clearly saw it as a burden—according to one worker, “You train them and they stay there for a couple of days and then they’re gone, and someone else comes and you have to train them.”
Sodexho political policy was also flawed (and continues to be so). Sodexho has the lowest percentage of unionized workers among the three major U.S. foodservice contractors. In the 1995 Sodexho-Marriott “Union Avoidance Manual,” it notes that union employee receives a median $602 a week, as opposed to non-union employees, who receive only $447.57 Sodexho therefore states that it will use “every reasonable legal and ethical means available” to prevent unionization of their employees or appeals to government labor agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They cite “Job Loss” (i.e. being fired, it seems) as the number one reason why employees should not seek to form labor unions, and later list “Loss of Individuality” and “Union Domination.” It states that managers should seek to dissuade workers from joining unions by “giving opinions on unions and union leaders, even in derogatory terms” and making comparisons only “where wages are lower and benefits less desirable.” The report notes (because deciding to sign union cards is legally up to the employee) that managers can only state that employees “should not in his opinion even express any interest in the union.” This anti-union policy necessitates a policy of general censorship: “if an employer allows its employees to post whatever they wish on the [employee] bulletin board, the employer will not be able to prohibit postings promoting union causes.”
Just as we began to document these horrific policies, we oversaw and pushed for a change in administration and were lucky enough to be able to work with a new pro-worker administration. Over a period of a year and a half, we compiled our data into a report passed around campus, while collecting nearly 900 signatures out of a student body of approximately 2000, as well as collecting over 100 professorial and administrative signatures. By appealing to the money saved by a decrease in turnover and re-training costs, we were able to convince the college to appoint a labor practices committee in 2002, who issued their recommendations in 2003. Wage increases slowly became evident, but, by 2003, we concluded that we failed in our campaign. We were not yet at a living wage (nor did we expect to be), but, more importantly, we had not created a procedure for continuing pressure on Sodexho and Colorado College by seeking new students to continue our legacy. However, I returned for a homecoming weekend in 2008 and found Sodexho had left due to unwillingness to comply with new rules on wages, work hours, and benefits.
I do not tell these stories and give these numbers to glorify our organization or bore you, my dear reader. I hope that you meditate on whether you would like to continue having your tuition money at DU go to such a corporation as Sodexho, as I am sure you never knew the extent of their transgressions. I also write to share the success of our non-violent and cooperative campaign at Colorado College. Such as campaign at DU would not, I think, be so easy, but I challenge us, as a community, to, at the very least, investigate the wages and work conditions for our workers and decide whether we think it fit to do nothing while such conditions may exist in our midsts.
For more information about Sodexo and/or living wages, please e-mail the author.
