Compass/Chartwells food service workers at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, made great gains in ratifying a new union contract. Demonstrating overwhelming support, Chartwells workers voted to ratify the new contract by 100%. In a strong show of interest, more than 80% of the total Chartwells workforce throughout the SFU campus turned out for the vote. The new contract includes solid wage gains, 100% health and dental coverage and new union rights. Members of UNITE HERE Local 40, Chartwells food service workers at SFU work in outlets throughout the university including Tim Hortons, White Spot, Residents Dining Hall, Mackenzie Cafeteria, the DAC and C-Store. Chartwells is a division of food service contractor, Compass.
UNITE HERE is excited to be an official partner of the first national Food Day. Food Day seeks to bring together Americans from all walks of life to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way.
We’ll be celebrating Food Day by hosting and participating in events on college campuses across the United States. The events – held at multiple locations in Baltimore, Boston, Connecticut, Chicago, and the Los Angeles area – will bring together food workers with students, faculty, and community food organizations, creating an opportunity for participants from diverse backgrounds to cook, eat, talk, listen and learn from each other about how to improve our food system. Below are the key events:
Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
As part of Food Day, Harvard food workers and students will launch the Harvard Sustainable Food Project to push for more sustainable food and jobs at the university. Students and food worker will bake bread together, highlighting the university’s decision to close its in-house bakeshop several years ago. Following the “breaking of bread,” workers, students and a representative of Real Food Challenge will have a panel discussion about moving food sustainability forward at Harvard.
October 26 @ 8:30For more information, please contact Brooks Bitterman at [email protected]
Pomona College (Claremont, CA)
Pomona College food service workers will join with university students to prepare and cook a local sustainable afternoon meal (Pappardelle with Ricotta and Swiss Chard) using ingredients from the Pomona College Organic Farm and local farmers market. In addition, participants will engage in a discussion about food security and sustainability on and off campus. Sponsored by UNITE HERE Local 11, Workers for Justice, Pomona Students for Environmental Activism and Responsibility (PEAR) and the Pitzer Eco Center. Speakers at the event will include Bob Gottlieb, co-author of the book Food Justice and Director of the Urban Environmental Policy Institute, and Frank Douglass, a Yale University cook and recently-elected New Haven Alderman.
October 24 @ 4:00 pm
For more information, please contact Jessica Choy at [email protected]
Northwestern University (Chicago, IL)
Exciting events will be happening at Northwestern University throughout the week of Food Day, including gardening, a film screening and a community forum. Members of UNITE HERE Local 1 representing different workplaces from Chicago’s food service industry will join students, Northwestern’s Sodexo management and two chefs from Evanston restaurants to discuss the real food movement and its connection to campus, jobs, and Chicagoland communities. Following the discussion, members of UNITE HERE will lead tours of one of Northwestern’s largest kitchens to give attendees a better sense of how campus food service works day-to-day.
October 24 @ 6:00 PM
For more information, please contact Kyle Schafer at [email protected]
New Haven, CT
On October 24, workers, students, and parents will come together to cook, eat, and learn about sustainable food at Yale and the New Haven Public School system (NHPS). In the morning, members of Local 35 and Local 217, which represent food service workers at Yale University and New Haven Public Schools, respectively, Yale undergraduates, and New Haven students will tour Yale kitchens and NHPS cafeterias. In the afternoon, Yale’s chef Stu Comen will teach a cooking class, using a recipe from Yale Dining and locally-sourced ingredients. At 5:00 pm, participants will share the meal, and at 6:30 food service workers and students active in the sustainable food movement will speak in a panel on real food and real jobs in New Haven. Yale University and New Haven Public Schools have both developed programs to bring more healthy, local, and sustainable food into school cafeterias and dining halls. Speakers will include student and worker leaders, as well as Tyisha Walker, cook’s helper in Yale’s dining halls and alderwoman elect for Ward 23.
October 24 @ 6:30 PM
For more information, please contact Rachel Payne at [email protected]
John Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD)
John Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) UNITE HERE workers will be supporting the efforts of students from Real Food Hopkins, a campus chapter of the national Real Food Challenge, at Johns Hopkins University by helping them prepare their 100 Mile Meal (a meal sourced from food that is bought from local growers, producers and bakers who live within a 100 mile radius of the campus). Food service workers will be helping students in the kitchen to prepare the meal, and will be going out to meet local farmers who will be supplying the food.
October 29 @ 5:00 PM
For more information, please contact [email protected]
Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, CA)
Loyola Marymount University faculty, workers, and students will join together to discuss why workers in all levels of the food production chain deserve better treatment, and why it is essential to include workers when discussing the sustainability movement. After listening from experts in the field and workers’ testimonies, panelists will call the audience to action so that they can bring awareness to this issue not only on-campus, but in our greater Los Angeles community.
October 24
Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)
Students and UNITE HERE Local 217 campus food workers are hosting "Crisp Talk: Food Stories from Different Perspectives." The event will feature apple crisp made the night before by students and workers using apples from a local orchard. At the discussion, attendees will hear stories from Local 217 member and Wesleyan food service worker, Raquel Baptiste, as well as Wesleyan student and food activist, Manon Lefevre. Also speaking will be a local apple grower and Bon Appetites’ production chef, Ernie Arroyo. Remarks will be followed by a Real Food Challenge training exercise and discussion of where we go from here.
October 27 @ 5:30 PM
For more information, please contact Ellen Thomson at [email protected]
Check out Real Food Real Jobs for more information.
Over 200 members of UNITE HERE Local 217, cafeteria workers at two universities and two public school districts have reached new collective bargaining agreements with their employer, Sodexo.
Cafeteria workers at Fairfield University, Central Connecticut State University, Stratford Public Schools and Shelton Public Schools celebrated their achievements after beginning negotiations in September and standing together in solidarity across the state in order to make progress on important issues with the new contracts.
Though the terms of each agreement vary, the most important issues at all four schools were improving the costs of healthcare, wage increases, and protecting paid time off. Union members at all four schools voted to ratify the new agreements during the week of October 10.
Local 217 represents over 3,000 hospitality, food service and airport workers in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
UNITE HERE’s role in the sustainable food movement is about to take an enormous step forward, as UNITE HERE members who cook in campus dining halls and public schools are teaming up with students on their campuses to participate in the first national Food Day on October 24. Food Day events around the country will bring communities together to push for health, affordable food produced – and served – sustainably and humanely.
UNITE HERE members and local unions from coast to coast are preparing to participate in Food Day, including: Local 11 in Los Angeles, Local 1 in Chicago, Local 7 in Baltimore, Locals 25 and 217 in Connecticut, and Local 26 in Boston.
"Working together with students on real food is a win-win situation," says Guy Mitchell, a food service worker at Johns Hopkins University and member of UNITE HERE Local 7. "Getting real food and using good recipes means more, real work at good wages for us. It means better, healthier food for everyone."
As the largest worker organization in the country representing food service workers, UNITE HERE is proud to be an official partner of Food Day. To find out more about events on and following October 24, visit the new website www.realfoodrealjobs.org, and keep up with the latest developments by becoming a fan on Facebook and following us on Twitter at @RealFoodandJobs.
On October 12th hundreds of UNITE HERE Local 57 members converged on the Consol Energy Center after rallying in front of some of the city’s largest hotels. This action comes amid the expiration of contracts between Local 57 members and the Westin, Omni William Penn and Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh hotels.
The march began at Mellon Square and ended at the Consol Center where Local 57 members are also in the midst of ongoing negotiations with food service provider Aramark.
The rally united Local 57’s food service and hotel workers behind a common demand: good faith negotiations to secure contracts that allow workers to share in the success of the city’s booming hospitality and service sector.
"The hospitality industry is booming in this region in large part because of the customer service that Pittsburgh workers provide. We are here to demand that hospitality employers in Pittsburgh place the same value in that service as we do," said Omni William Penn Ideal Services Agent and Local 57 Executive Board Member Mario Davis.
On October 10 Local 26 members at dining halls at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA ratified a new contract with Aramark that offers some of the same groundbreaking gains won by workers at Harvard dining halls last month.
The new contract language offers new and improved health care and wage increases of $2.60 an hour over the life of the contract, including a retroactive wage increase staring from July. Negotiations had stalled in weeks prior, with Aramark demanding higher deductibles and co-payments.
Another victory against temporary jobs in dining halls was won; the new contract ensures that open shifts will be offered to full-time and part-time employees before given to contracted workers.
In similar language won at Harvard, Brandeis dining hall workers will now enjoy campus-wide, not department, seniority and are protected with stronger immigration language.
Local 26 ratified the agreement by more than 98 percent.
As Los Angeles’ Hotel Bel-Air sets to reopen on October 14, former employees are fighting for their jobs back. In Fall 2009, the management abruptly announced it would completely shut down and layoff all employees on the day the workers’ union contract expired.
Unlike hotels such as the Wilshire Grand, Beverly Hilton and more, the Bel-Air refused to guarantee that workers, many who had given 15 or 20 years of service to the hotel, would be able to come back to work. More than 100 workers who have re-applied for their old jobs have been refused or are waiting to hear from the hotel.
In addition to a rally and press conference held on October 10, workers also called for a boycott of the tony hotel, asking that members of the community and out-of-town guests not meet, sleep or eat at Hotel Bel-Air.
"For five years, I worked as the assistant to the banquets manager, handling special events for celebrities and dignitaries who paid top-dollar for excellent service and privacy, and I was very good at my job. But shortly after I re-applied for my old position, I got a postcard in the mail from the Bel-Air saying the hotel is ‘pursuing other candidates with who better match the job qualifications.’ I feel insulted and hurt," said Martin Tabares, a former Bel-Air employee.
Tom Walsh, president of the hotel workers’ union UNITE HERE Local 11, said the union and the workers have no intention of letting this out-of-town company bully workers who took the hotel from a four-star to five-star establishment.
"It is not the curtains, furniture or the flat-screen TVs that make the Hotel Bel-Air so special, it’s the top-notch service provided for decades by these workers," said Walsh, "The Bel-Air is treating the workers like dated sofas, throwing them out in the garbage."
44 young UNITE HERE leaders joined more than 800 attendees from all over the labor movement for the AFL-CIO’s "Next Up" Youth Summit, held in Minneapolis from Sept. 29 to October 2. Members, students, volunteers and organizers from UNITE HERE, the Organizing Beyond Barriers program and 19 different UNITE HERE local unions participated and shared their stories from work in ongoing campaigns across the union.
During the conference, participants took part in support actions for Verizon workers, and Minneapolis transit workers represented by the Amalgamted Transit Union; signed petitions to support postal workers, and circulated support items for Hyatt and LSG Sky Chefs workers.
The conference also included speeches by U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Schuler. During the conference workshops, members of UNITE HERE shared positive stories of new organizing victories and our union’s ongoing campaigns.