And then there was one…

This past spring, New College students in Sarasota, Florida, joined with CIW and Interfaith Action representatives to deliver a petition containing hundreds of student signatures to the campus foodservice company, Sodexo, calling on Sodexo to follow the example of other foodservice leaders and join in partnership with the CIW to improve farm labor wages and working conditions.

Sodexo — “lone holdout” among major foodservice companies — under attack on campus for failing to reach Fair Food agreement with CIW…

By almost any measure, the Student/Farmworker Alliance’s “Dine with Dignity” campaign has been a tremendous success.

Since just April of last year, the SFA has helped the CIW secure Fair Food agreements with three of the foodservice industry’s four leading companies — Bon Appetit, Compass, and Aramark. Each of those agreements has helped raise the bar toward ever stronger, more enduring human rights standards for farmworkers in Florida’s tomato fields.

But there is one foodservice company — Paris-based Sodexo — that remains, stubborn and alone, standing against the tide of change. As this past school year wound down, students on campuses across the country where Sodexo operates began to set their sights on the foodservice giant. Below is one example, a letter to the editor by New College student Claire Comiskey, calling on Sodexo to take the recent visit of U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis to Immokalee as a sign of the urgent need for labor reforms in Florida’s tomato industry. The letter followed a campus-wide petition campaign (pictured above) that gathered hundreds of student signatures in support of the Campaign for Fair Food. Here’s the letter, in its entirety:

Slavery in Florida’s fields

Published: Saturday, May 22, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.

On Monday, the U.S. secretary of labor visited Immokalee, an agricultural community two hours southeast of Sarasota. Students and faculty at New College, where I serve as an official student representative of the university’s food committee, have long worked closely with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the award-winning farmworker group based there.

While in Immokalee, Secretary Hilda Solis met with CIW members to learn more about the human rights crisis in Florida’s fields. The CIW has worked with federal officials to investigate and prosecute six separate slavery operations since 1997, involving more than a thousand workers forced to labor against their will in our state’s fields.

The CIW has enlisted the support of eight multibillion-dollar food corporations to help put an end to abuses, among them Aramark and Compass Group — two of the country’s largest food-service provider companies. The lone major holdout in the food-service industry not joining CIW efforts is Sodexo, the operator of New College’s dining contract.

Hundreds of New College students have signed petitions calling on Sodexo to likewise be part of the solution, but Sodexo has so far refused. Its reluctance is deeply disappointing, and we hope Secretary Solis’ visit underscores to Sodexo the importance of taking a stand against possible human rights violations in its tomato supply chain.

Claire Comiskey
Sarasota

With students like those at New College refusing to take no for an answer, and the SFA readying for its annual student Encuentro in Immokalee ahead of the coming school year, this fall promises to be a hot one for Sodexo wherever it does business on college campuses.

Click here for more on how you can help make the SFA’s “Dine with Dignity” campaign an unqualified success.