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    STUDENT ACTION WITH WORKERS |
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Student Action with We support a living wage for all workers and the right to collective bargaining. Meetings: Wednesdays 8PM Alumni Hall, 313 Newsletter Archive:
Check out the Living Wage Action Center!
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Support ARAMARK Workers at UNC! The workers at UNC dining halls are severely mistreated; most of them cannot afford health care and do not receive raises after working for several years while they continue to work long, arduous hours. They are employed by Aramark, an international service corporation (that made $9 billion last year) that is well known for its corrupt labor practices. There is a long and painful history of dining hall employee exploitation on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. In 1969, the dining hall workers (who then worked directly for UNC as public employees), went on strike to improve working conditions and raise wages to a living wage, which proved to be successful with the help of students. Soon after the strikes, UNC outsourced its dining services, a practice which has remained ever since. Working conditions of today are similar to that of the past. Institutional racism reigns in the dining halls; as a result of historical trends and employer practices which allow them to continue, the employee workforce is homogeneously Black and Latino while management is predominantly white. Just last year, a long time minority female employee, Lezlie Sumpter, was fired for speaking out about being allegedly sexually harassed by Aramark management. A campaign to unionize the workers has been in effect since the beginning of the year which has been widely supported by Aramark employees and students. Service Workers United (SWU) is attempting to do this through a process called card check neutrality. This is a fair process in which workers choose if they want to join a labor union by signing a card which verifies this. If 50 percent plus one of workers sign a card, then Aramark would be obligated to recognize that the workers have a union and would be required to negotiate a contract. Card check is the alternative to the traditional method of union recognition which is by voting through the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board). This method is highly ineffective because it can easily be thwarted by an employer through false information and intimidation campaigns prior to en election. Aramark management has been adamantly fighting the unionization effort. They sent out blatantly anti-union letters to their employees in March and have tried to intimidate and stop students from passing out truthful literature to workers. They are also attempting to discourage unionization by intimidating employees. Vel Dowdy, an employee of six years at Lenoir Dining Hall, is widely regarded as a worker leader and has exceptional relationships with many UNC students. On March 24th, 2005, she was suspended from work and arrested while on the job. She was charged with “embezzlement of food,” a federal felony. University Police stated that Ms. Dowdy had been under investigation starting a few weeks beforehand, which is the same time that she had become outspokenly pro-union. This was a deliberate scare tactic aimed at intimidating other workers from exercising their rights to free speech. We believe that workers have seen the firing of one of the most well-connected and outspoken Lenoir employees as a direct threat to their own job security if they were to choose to also speak out or join a union. SAW is a nonviolent campus organization which works to educate the campus community about worker’s rights issues and especially to support the campus dining hall employees in their unionization effort. We support the right to collectively bargain for all campus employees, both public and private, although public employees do not legally have the right to do so. SAW recently held a rally on UNC’s campus, during which it presented the Chancellor’s office with its demands which include requiring Aramark to reinstate Vel Dowdy and drop the charge against her, to certify and pressure Aramark to bargain with a labor union and to stop the mistreatment and intimidation of all workers. Press Releases April 25, 2005 April 12, 2005 April 11, 2005 April 4, 2005 March 29, 2005 Press Coverage
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