The Public University as an institution and ideal has experienced significant transformations under neoliberal capitalism. Etzkowitz et al. note the emergence of what they call the “entrepreneurial university” or the incorporation of market ideals in the university mission as a global phenomenon.[1] Rizvi explains that privatization has restructured how the public university is governed.[2] Preist, Jacobs, and Boon point out that the auxiliary corporation plays an increasingly significant role in public university contracting.[3] At the University at Albany, University Auxiliary Services (UAS) was established to handle external contracting with food service, bookstore, and other providers. UAS is a site where University staff, faculty and students actively engage with corporations and have incorporated some market tenants into the governance structure. The University Auxiliary Service Corporation can also be understood as an institution established to function partly outside of the public and to be more flexible for market engagement thus helping to facilitate the privatization of the public. I plan to explore the implications of this restructuring by looking at how UAS has historically engaged with the unionization efforts of campus food service workers. Attention to the relationship between institutions (public and private) and labor will guide my examination of how the University Auxiliary Service Corporation (a quasi-state organization) and subcontracted food service corporations interact with campus food service workers. UAS has occupied a spectrum of positions vis-à-vis workers and private interests, but consistently attempts to locate workers outside the University

Labor and the University: Connecting International and U.S. Trends to Campus Food Service

Aihwa Ong defines neoliberalism as “mobile calculative techniques of governing that can be decontextualized from their original sources and recontextualized in constellations of mutually constitutive and contingent relationships.”[4] Ong’s definition of neoliberalism allows for a localized analysis of a global trend because it frames neoliberalism as a set of techniques linked to new modes of governmentality, not a specific culture or structure that is easily definable or homogenously applied across various geographies. Ong also draws attention to the relationship between neoliberalism and exception arguing that exceptions to neoliberal techniques can be employed to both include and exclude specific peoples. She uses migrant workers, refugees, and trafficked peoples as an example of excluded populations who are denied citizenship or other rights. She argues that, “in these situations of humanitarian crisis, legal citizenship is merely one of multiple schemes for (re)ordering and (re)evaluating humanity.”[5] In a U.S. context, citizenship is one mechanism through which exclusion of specific populations takes place.

Within the U.S., food supply and food service work is dominated by immigrant labor. About 60% of farmworkers in the United States are undocumented or about 6 in 10.[6]  Although technically contracted work, the contracts farmworkers engage in tend to be highly exploitative. In a report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one Latino immigrant working on a tomato farm in Florida reported making 45 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes with no sick or vacation days, no health insurance, and daily exposure to pesticides. Inherent in the various forms of contractual exclusion (i.e. subcontracting agreements, flexible labor positions, piece work, or under the table work) is a fundamental devaluing of labor. Frequently, subcategories of ‘official’ labor positions are created to skirt state or federal labor laws. Underlying the contractual exclusion of immigrant workers is an unwillingness to recognize individuals as full citizens subject to all the rights and entitlements of citizenship.

As of November 2010, there were 443 food service workers at University at Albany.[7] Overall, there are 295 union workers, 100 student workers, and 48 managers. Over sixty percent of workers are currently unionized.[8] Most of Chartwells’ staff (86%) works in the dining halls and the Campus Center; 55% work in State, Indian, Alumni, Colonial and Dutch quads and 31% work in the Campus Center.[9] The remainder of Chartwells staff (14%) work in other locations including Administration, the Downtown campus, Nano Café, and Catering. According to the Human Resources Office at University at Albany, there are currently an estimated 4,400 employees at the University at Albany which includes the Research Foundation and Graduate Assistants.[10] If campus food service workers were included in the University workforce, they would comprise 10% of University employees meaning they are a significant and potentially powerful block. The exclusion of campus food service workers from official recognition denies them access to University boards, councils, and committees.

While there are notable risks in making the comparison between citizenship of a nation-state and membership to a campus community, there are logical parallels that can be drawn between global and national trends that have attempted to locate certain groups of laborers outside the nation-state by excluding them from citizenship rights and a trend at the University at Albany to locate campus food service workers outside the University by excluding them from the campus workforce. It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the historical roots of nation-state formation or conceptions of citizenship, but common in both locations is the fact that specific types of membership have undergone significant transformations under neoliberal capitalism. Also, that these transformations have included a reordering of rights and entitlements in order to extract cheaper labor from vulnerable workers.

Campus Food Service Workers under the Faculty Student Association (FSA) and University Auxiliary Services (UAS) Management

Auxiliary service corporations exist at a number of colleges and universities SUNY-wide. There is a SUNY Auxiliary Services Association (SASA) that meets annually and includes members from over 30 campuses, as well as members from the Research Foundation and Systems Administration. The SASA website gives a brief history of the rise of auxiliary service corporations (ASCs) within SUNY, stating that State University campuses began chartering non-profit corporations in the 1950s to administer campus activities and:

to further insulate NYS from services with high liability exposure and because NYS agency requirements and systems for accounting, reporting, and budgeting can not effectively accommodate retail and consumer service enterprises.[11]

There are three main purposes for the establishment of ASCs; to protect SUNY campuses from liability issues, to provide SUNY with agencies that can more actively engage with private capital, and to take advantage of tax breaks and public funding available to corporations in New York State through Industrial Development Agency (IDA) financing.

Prior to ASCs, many campuses had Faculty Student Associations (FSA), including University at Albany. It is unclear when FSA began, but it switched from FSA to UAS over the summer of 1976. About a year prior to the transition, University at Albany students had voted themselves as a majority on two of the FSA boards. As an Albany Student Press article recounts, “besides a basic yearning of the students involved to achieve a greater voice in FSA, what helped to bring about the dramatic actions of the day was the inopportune absence of a faculty member.”[12] Student members of FSA, realizing they had a voting majority, restructured the bylaws to allow for a student majority on the FSA membership board and the FSA board of directors. Shorty afterwards, students mobilized to vote in a student FSA President and pass a 4% rebate for students with meal plans.[13] The rebate exemplified the fact that students were dissatisfied with how FSA was doing business on campus, mainly the fact that they were attempting to accrue funds for other campus activities on the backs of students and their meal plan dollars. Students argued that FSA had accumulated an excess of funds over the previous 3 years which belonged to students and therefore should be given back.

About a year after students voted themselves as a majority in FSA, it was transformed into UAS. There is no note in the Albany Student Press of what motivated the change at UAlbany’s campus; in a June 1976 article there is simply a parenthetical reference to UAS as the former FSA. Yet, SASA’s website provides some statewide context to these changes noting that in 1967 a statewide committee was appointed by the Vice Chancellor for Business and Finance to review the scope of FSAs SUNY-wide.[14] The committee recommended more standardization throughout the SUNY system and the report comments that:

[T]he rather informal association governance style attendant to campus FSAs gradually gave way to the more structured membership corporation model we have today, collectively referred to as Auxiliary Service Corporations (ASCs).[15]

While not explicitly stated, an “informal association governance style” could read as a governance style more susceptible to student control or open to democratic processes in locations where students or other members of the community were able to gain active control of FSA boards. Either way, the shift from FSA to UAS resulted in a more corporatized structure that would make it impossible, in its contemporary form, for UAlbany students to gain majority control over a UAS board ever again.[16]

There are conflicting records on the date University Auxiliary Services was established, the Albany Student Press starts mentioning its existence in June 1976, but the UAS office dates its establishment to 1950.[17] The shift from FSA to UAS marked a change in the governance structure of campus service management that began to move its operations further away from the logics of public governance. For example, the governance bodies of public institutions are subject to Freedom of Information Law requests and Open Meetings Law yet there has been contestation over whether ASCs in SUNY are subject to those laws. The main point of contention is whether or not ASCs are “public bodies.”

The NYS Committee on Open Government has issued three opinions on auxiliary corporations within SUNY commenting on the confusing nature of auxiliary corporations and their relationship to the state. In 1993, the United Industry Workers Local 424 requested SUNY Farmingdale’s Request for Proposal (RFP) for food service and the contract between SUNY Farmingdale and Bon Appétit Management and was denied.[18] The union representative was requesting the information because of concerns that, “[SUNY Farmingdale] ‘through its ‘Auxiliary Service Corporation’ has contracted with Bon Appetit Management of California’, and that a number of employees ‘may face job loss and health care loss due to the contractor's position.”[19] Robert Freeman, Director of the Committee on Open Government, commented that:

If the Auxiliary Services Corporation exists due to its relationship with SUNY College at Farmingdale, and if the College would perform the functions of the Corporation if the Corporation had not been created, it might be concluded that such an entity conducts public business and performs a governmental function for the University.[20]

Freeman is challenging ASCs position as an agency wholly separate from a public institution by asserting that since it carries out the functions of a public institution it should be subject to the same rules and regulations.

The issue of ASCs status as a public or non-public agency was brought to the attention of the Committee on Open Government again in 1998 and 2001. In 2001, a University at Albany student requested an opinion from the Committee on Open Government because the student had been asked to leave a UAS meeting prior to the approval of a meal plan fee hike and told by the UAS Executive Director that UAS was subject to neither Open Meetings Law nor FOIL requests. In response, Director Robert Freeman argued that:

I believe that each condition necessary to a finding that the board of UAS is a "public body" may be met. It is an entity for which a quorum is required pursuant to the provisions of the Not-for-Profit Corporation Law. It consists of more than two members. In view of the degree of governmental control exercised by and its nexus with the University at Albany, I believe that it conducts public business and performs a governmental function for a governmental entity.[21]

Here Freeman again asserts that ASCs, despite their attempts to skirt public law, are public bodies, performing public functions. All three opinions (1993, 1998, and 2001) occur around the time when ASCs began contracting more heavily with outside corporate vendors and two pertain, either directly or tangentially, to UAS’ relationship with a contractor.

UAS Subcontracts Food Service to Sodexho-Marriott

Over the past 30 years campus food services at University at Albany has been managed by three different parties. Before 1999, campus food service was managed by the Faculty Student Association (FSA) which later became University Auxiliary Services (UAS); both were considered University bodies and therefore workers were managed directly by the University. In July 1999, UAS made the decision to subcontract campus dining services to a private corporation and awarded the contract to Sodexho-Marriott who managed the food service contract until June 2000. On July 1, 2000 Chartwells, a division of the Compass Group, took over the contract and currently manages food service at University at Albany.

In the Spring of 1999, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) organized a union drive among campus food service workers at the University at Albany, SUNY.[22] After 70% of the workers signed cards expressing their desire to have a union, the cards were delivered to University Auxiliary Services (UAS). In June of 1999, UAS agreed to recognize the union, yet less than a month later they contracted out to the Sodexho-Marriott Corporation who took over the food service contract on July 1, 1999.[23]

Under Sodexho-Marriott working conditions worsened and the companyrefused to recognize the union. As Larry Wittner explains:

The company stripped workers of hundreds of hours of accumulated sick time and, also, quadruped their health insurance premiums.  As workers were paid only $6 to $7 an hour, many had no choice but to opt out of Sodexho-Marriott's expensive health care plan.  Facing reduced benefits and deteriorating working conditions, the number of regular employees plummeted.  Because of the now chronic understaffing, most workers put in 12-hour shifts.  Workers were told that they could not discuss job conditions among themselves or with others.  And when some dared to wear "Union Yes" pins, Sodexho-Marriott managers ordered them to remove these traces of resistance.[24]

In response to Sodexho’s unwillingness to recognize the union, students, faculty and community members formed the Student-Labor Initiative (SLI, pronounced "sly") and began organizing actions to draw attention to Sodexho’s anti-union practices as well as their investment in privatized prisons nationally.[25] HERE, Local 471 simultaneously filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.[26]

Members of the campus community mounted a year-long campaign to back the campus food service workers right to unionize. In response, UAS and other University administrators attempted to avoid involvement in the labor dispute. Wittner states, “despite these early protests, the assorted campus managers—the administration, UAS, and Sodexho-Marriott—resorted to every possible excuse to evade the issue of the mistreatment of food service workers.”[27]

Despite the University and UASs assertions that an intervention was beyond their scope, campus discontent with Sodexho continued to mount and an outbreak of e-coli bacteria in the Indian Dining Hall at the end of March exacerbated dissatisfaction with the company. In April, the campaign intensified and culminated in a sit-in in the University President’s office.

Amber Martin, a student organizer, commented, “Our message [is] loud and clear: boot Sodexho-Marriott and hold all campus contractors to basic standards of behavior towards their workers.”[28] Less than a month later, UAS announced its decision to end the contract with Sodexho-Marriott and put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a new food service provider. Sodexho’s contract had only lasted for one academic year (1999-2000).

Chartwells, UAS, and Workers United Local 471

On July 1, 2000 Chartwells, a division of the Compass Group, took over the contract and currently manages food service at University at Albany. While there may have been other worker and union struggles during Chartwells’ management, I focus on Fall 2009, when Chartwells prohibited the union representative from entering the dining halls.[29]

In September 2009, the Workers United, Local 471 union representative, Amanda Lefton investigated a number of workplace grievances including potentially hazardous working conditions, delays in holiday pay, and wage violations. In one instance, workers had to work in 110-degree conditions when two vents in the Colonial Quad dining hall broke.[30] As one worker stated, “We went two or three days in those conditions. Chartwells didn’t help at all until the complaints got heavy.”[31] Shortly after Lefton began pursuing grievances and attempting to hold Chartwells to the collective bargaining agreement, she was notified that Chartwells would no longer recognize Workers United, Local 471 as the appropriate bargaining unit and therefore Lefton was not allowed on the premises. Chartwells refused to meet with Lefton, started placing union dues in escrow, advised workers not to post notices on union bulletin boards, and told workers not to speak with students about working conditions when off the clock.[32]

Chartwells justified their actions on the basis that there was a national dispute between UNITE HERE and Service Employees International Union (SEIU). According to a report sent to United University Professions (UUP):

Earlier this year Chartwells received competing representation claims from UNITE HERE and the Rochester Regional Joint Board (Workers United-SEIU) regarding our hourly associates at University at Albany. These competing claims are related to the disaffiliation of the Rochester Regional Joint Board (RRJB), as well as multiple other joint boards across the country, from UNITE HERE and their subsequent affiliation with SEIU.[33]

In April 2009, Local 471 decided to disaffiliate with UNITE HERE. Although Chartwells stated the reason for denying Lefton access to the campus was due to competing representation claims, Chartwells had waited over 5 months to act. Due to the timing of Chartwells’ action, Workers United, Local 471 viewed their decision to ban Lefton from the University at Albany campus as retaliation for the filing of successful grievances stating, “This is blatant retaliation against the workers for attempting to prevent wage violations and aggressively investigating hazardous working conditions.”[34] The union also asserted that workers had chosen to have Workers United, Local 471 represent them stating, “The Union members, have voiced their choice three times to keep their Union, Workers United Local 471.”[35]

Following Lefton’s banning from the University at Albany campus, she began to contact campus union representatives and student organizations to mobilize against Chartwells’ decision. Larry Wittner, Chair of the Albany Chapter UUP Solidarity Committee, agreed to organize a meeting with members of Local 471 to discuss Chartwells’ decision to terminate union representation. On Wednesday November 11, 2009 at 11:30am, campus food service workers and members of Workers United, Local 471, students and faculty members gathered in front of the Campus Center to protest Chartwells’ actions. A number of student speakers emphasized that the food service workers were undoubtedly a part of the UAlbany community. Bredan Anderson, UAlbany student and member of the College Democrats stated, “I’m not going to stand by while some folks in our community are taken advantage of and neither should the University nor its students.”[36] Ben Jacobs, another UAlbany student and member of the College Democrats also emphasized the workers place in the UAlbany community stating:

We’re here to say, as students, that the Chartwells workers and the food service workers on this campus are part of our community and we will not tolerate the mistreatment of them or anyone else in our community. It is our duty and our responsibility to make sure that there is fair and equal treatment of everyone on this campus.[37]

Those at the rally were clearly contesting the University’s position that since food service workers were managed by Chartwells, the University had no responsibility in enforcing labor rights.

After rallying in front of the Campus Center, the rally marched to the President’s office where Rev. Mike Roberts, District Director of Workers United, Local 471 and Tracey Cobbs, Chartwells’ worker and Union leader entered the building and asked to speak with President George Philip. Roberts and Cobbs were met by Kevin Wilcox, University Controller and board member of University Auxiliary Services. Wilcox stated, “This is not my issue. To be honest, this is not a University issue. This is an issue with Chartwells.”[38] Roberts responded stating, “So far, as you are, the President is trying to maintain that SUNY Albany does not have the right to insist that its vendors behave ethically.” Wilcox later insisted again, “Let me make something clear, they’re not University workers.”[39] Wilcox then agreed to take a message for the President, but refused to be involved. Cobbs voiced her frustration with Wilcox stating:

No one right now wants to take responsibility for anything. Compass [Group] just had someone come in and tell us they’re not responsible. We’re being told by the President they’re not responsible. Somebody on this campus is responsible for something.[40]

Wilcox was not interested in whether or not Chartwells was upholding basic labor standards, but based his argument in the logic that campus food service workers were not University workers and therefore the University was not responsible for the enforcement of labor rights. By framing the argument as an issue of responsibility, Wilcox discursively positioned campus food service workers as outsiders, not entitled to the same rights as other University workers or members of the campus community.

Conclusion: Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Campus Food Service Labor and University Governance

Capitalism has always put considerable pressure on the University, but the particularities of restructuring under neoliberalism have significantly transformed labor relations and University governance at the University at Albany. Auxiliary Service Corporations were formed SUNY-wide beginning in the 1950s and were established to protect SUNY campuses from liability issues, to provide SUNY with agencies that could more actively engage with private capital, and to take advantage of tax breaks and public funding available to corporations in New York State. The structure of UAS allowed for the limiting of a student voice on its board and a broader limiting of public engagement with University decisions by attempts to close meetings and records to the public. Also, the UAS structure allowed for the outsourcing of campus services leading to the exclusion of campus food service workers from the campus community and a worsening of working conditions and benefits. The Board members of UAS’ have attempted to limit the space for resistance by contesting UAS’ ‘public’ function, by defining campus food service workers as non-University workers, and limiting student representation on its board. If we are to build a more inclusive, democratic University the structures on campus must be transformed to cater to public engagement and the inclusion of a broader campus community which includes campus food service workers.

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