McKenna Schueler/Orlando Weekly
Students and faculty at Rollins College march in support of dining workers’ rights to organize for a union.
Food service and dining workers at Rollins College, a private college near Orlando, have officially filed to unionize with the labor union Unite Here, after quietly launching an organizing campaign last August.
At least 75 workers would be represented by the union, according to a petition filed with the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections in the private sector.
The hospitality union, Unite Here Local 362, would cover all full-time and regular part-time food service workers, as well as cooks, cashiers and dishwashers. Supervisors, guards, and management would be excluded.
Eric Clinton, president of Unite Here Local 362, told Orlando Weekly that workers are “really excited” for this next step in the process.
It’s the latest update in a first-of-its-kind organizing campaign at Rollins College, a private liberal arts college in Winter Park that currently has no union, not even for its faculty.
But this isn’t unexpected.
Dining workers employed by food service company Sodexo initially kept their unionization campaign under wraps for months. But earlier this year, after witnessing an escalation of alleged intimidation tactics from their employer that eventually got Winter Park police involved, they first told Orlando Weekly of their intent to unionize.
Four students from the University of Central Florida, allied with the pro-union workers, were cited with trespass warnings by Winter Park police in February while leafleting in support of the union on the private campus.
Sodexo management allegedly notified security of their presence. And the cops were called to kick them out, according to records Orlando Weekly obtained from Winter Park police.
Sodexo has a long history of union-busting, but it hasn’t deterred the workers’ unionization effort, which workers have said is driven by a desire to address wages that are insufficient to keep up with Central Florida’s cost of living, paltry job benefits, and inconsistent work schedules.
Multiple workers previously told Orlando Weekly that most of their colleagues in food service at the college — many of whom are people of color — make just around $15 per hour. Clinton said some of the workers make just $13 or $14 per hour.
That isn’t enough to make ends meet in Central Florida broadly, let alone anywhere near the college’s location in Winter Park, where the median household income is $88,688.
Rollins College itself is an expensive institution; the cheapest meal plan for students who live on-campus is $2,615 per semester.
Wages for longtime workers have largely remained stagnant. In some cases more experienced workers make less than the new hires they are training, according to several workers Orlando Weekly spoke to who’d been hired within the last year.
Filing a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to request a union election is one of two paths towards securing formal union recognition.
The other path, generally pursued first, involves getting voluntary recognition from an employer after gathering documentation from a majority of workers that demonstrates their support for unionization.
According to Clinton, the union president, Sodexo refused to voluntarily recognize the union campaign.
If the employer refuses to voluntarily recognize the union, workers can petition the NLRB for a union election, provided they have signed cards of support from at least 30% of employees eligible.
Clinton said they have a “majority” of workers in favor of unionization, with over 50% support.
Sodexo, a multinational company that’s reported a rise in revenues post-COVID closures, previously told Orlando Weekly in a statement that they respect the rights of their employees to unionize or not to unionize, adding that they have “hundreds” of union contracts with labor unions across the United States.
For instance, Sodexo employees at Disney World and the Orange County Convention Center are unionized, as are food service workers throughout the country at various university cafeterias, schools, and employee dining spaces for private companies, like Google.
A spokesperson for Rollins College previously stated the college “supports [Sodexo] employees’ right to discuss unionization.”
Students and faculty at the college have rallied in support of workers’ union efforts, and faculty of the College of Liberal Arts have passed a resolution stating that they “support the campus dining service workers employed by Sodexo in their effort to seek a fair process to decide whether to form a union.”