Cafeteria Workers Take on Food Service Giant; Vote to Authorize Strike in Four States

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thousands of low-wage workers are poised to take on Sodexo, one of the largest employers in the world, over the company's pattern of interfering with, restraining, and coercing workers who are fighting to form a union. The workers are prepared to strike to challenge Sodexo's decision to pay them as little as they can get away with in order to increase profits for top executives and investors.

"Workers everywhere are sick of global corporations getting richer while average Americans get poorer," said Services Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry. "I'm proud of the cafeteria workers who are standing up and fighting back. It's time that companies like Sodexo play by the same rules we grew up with—treat others like you want to be treated, with fairness and respect."

Cafeteria workers in Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania voted over a five day period to authorize a strike. Additional cafeteria workers in three other states are voting in coming days to determine whether they will walk off the job.

"I may be a lunch lady," said Rubynell Walker Barbee who works as a cashier at Morehouse College in Atlanta," but that doesn't mean I have to take whatever Sodexo dishes out.  I'm not striking just for me, I am striking for every single person in this country who keeps working harder but getting poorer."

Despite making more than a billion dollars profit in 2009, Sodexo pays its workers in the United States as little as $7.50 an hour, just 25 cents above the minimum wage.

As the nation creeps closer to the mid-term elections, the strikes provide keen insight into the tough times U.S. workers are facing, their growing anger and willingness to take action to break corporations' choke hold on jobs.

Despite U.S. workers being some of the most productive workers in the world, the rate of growth in U.S. wages and benefits is at a historic low. Wages for the corporate elite have never been higher—from 1990 to 2005, CEOs' pay increased almost 300%.  Sodexo is the perfect example: CEO Michel Landel takes home 269 times more than the workers he pays $7.50 an hour in the U.S.

To follow the strikes go to www.cleanupsodexo.org

SOURCE Service Employees International Union