This article may need a bit of contextualization first: almost two years ago, the SEIU launched a corporate campaign against Sodexo. It’s not particularly uncommon of unions to engage in vociferous campaigns against a corporation to obtain unionization rights. However, SEIU’s campaign against Sodexo differed on two notable counts. First, the scale of the campaign, with SEIU student organizations and international unions in several States as well as in other countries and spending several thousand dollars in the process. Second, and perhaps most important, the viciousness of the motives behind the campaign.
You see, in a “normal” union-driven corporate-campaign, a union backed up by company workers which are not or poorly represented, will fight to obtain the right to represent these workers. In SEIU’s case, the situation is rather different. The union has traditionally always been foreign to the catering industry. In accordance with its growth strategy, it decided to penetrate the sector. After all, unions are corporations like any other, and they make their money on the paiements of workers they represent.
In SEIU’s case, to try and secure greater financial growth (in spite of the fact that the union is already filthy rich) meant striking big. That’s why it went for Sodexo. Sodexo is the second largest company in the food-catering industry in the world and employs close to 380 000 people worlwide. For the workers-hungry union, it represented a tasty treat.
Only problem was, Sodexo has no problem with workers’ rights and is already in agreement with several unions in the United States and worldwide. Basically, noone there really needed SEIU – as a matter of fact, few workers have come forward during the campaign to specifically ask for the union to representent them. So SEIU went at it alone.
Well, not entirely alone… Using the vast sums of money it had in its coffers, it secured the help of foreign unions, student organizations and non-governmental organizations to give its campaign at least the appearance of legitimacy. It even took the time to have a dubious report redacted and published under another name, so has to create a semblance of tangibility to its claims.
Its official line all the way? Sodexo treats its workers poorly, they need union representation.
Nevermind the fragility of these claims as SEIU has now taken a new step away from the truth and towards blatant smear slinging. To get better media coverage, the union is now trying to capitalize on the fact that the quality of food served by Sodexo in some schools did not meet Federal guidelines.
In a country struggling with child-obesity and nutritional problems it really is a pithy that children are not given the best options at their school cafeteria, and for that reason, the blame should not be taken away from Sodexo. Yet, it is, ever so slightly, infuriating to watch the SEIU so sneakily seize the matter to serve its own hidden agenda.
The union wants to put pressure on Sodexo. And we’re sure Sodexo is pretty well aware of that. But in the process, the SEIU is losing its way. It doesn’t get enough media coverage by talking of workers’ conditions? Well then, why not move to the healthiness of food?
But what about workers now? Well the SEIU doesn’t really seem to care. It is now bragging about a “report” showing Sodexo’s failure at following Federal guidelines. Yet the report is published by its local New Jersey antenna, lists no sources, citing data that cannot be verified and interpreting it as it wills. We won’t say Sodexo meals in New Jersey are perfect – far from it – but we’re certainly not going to believe SEIU’s allegations when the only thing there is to support them are SEIU’s data.
Most interesting perhaps, is the fact that, in moving to attack Sodexo on its failure to meet federal guidelines in some New Jersey schools, SEIU has dropped all allegations of infringing on workers right. Is it that the union’s claims were bogus from the beginning or is it just that it cares so little about workers?
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