Sodexo workers put down their knives and spatulas and picked up a beat as they walked off the job for a daylong labor strike chanting, “What we want? We want change!”

Workers paraded through both Tulane and Loyola campuses, beginning at Bruff Commons and ending outside the Danna Center early Friday morning.

They marched to the beat of a drummer beating on a five-gallon bucket, chanting, “What we want? We want change!”

Sodexo workers voted to protest claims of unfair labor practices, alleging that Sodexo, the foodservice giant employing 379,749 people worldwide, has engaged in intimidation tactics.

Tanya Aquino, Senior Communications Specialist for Service Employees International Union, said workers protested, “to show Sodexo that enough’s enough…They [Sodexo workers] want to be able to exercise their rights freely.”

The SEIU is an international labor union representing 2.2 million workers and is the union vying to represent Sodexo workers worldwide.

Aquino said more than 50 Sodexo employees from both Tulane and Loyola Universities participated in the strike. The vast majority awere from Bruff Commons dining hall on Tulane’s campus.

The strike shut down the Smoothie King in the Danna Center and a service station in the Orleans Room, according to Ben Hartley, Area General Manager for Sodexo Campus Services.

He said that four Loyola workers had called in to say that they were participating in the strike.

Hartley said the striking workers will not be fired or suffer any disciplinary action for participating in the strike.

“We [Sodexo] support the rights of our workforce to unionize or not; whatever the workforce decides is most important for them. We support the right for them to do that through the…election process which is administered by the National Labor Relations Board.”

The NLRB is the federal government agency that oversees labor practices. The NLRB election process requires that employees wishing to unionize must first prove at least 30 percent of the worker group wishes to be represented by a union.

Once this is done, the agency verifies that there was no foul play by either the union or the employer. Only then can workers vote in secret ballot election to decide whether or not to unionize.

This process takes three weeks, according to Aquino. She claims that during that window, Sodexo will intimidate and threaten workers into not supporting the union.

Hartley disagrees with her.

“It certainly wouldn’t be in accordance with Sodexo’s fair treatment policy and it certainly wouldn’t be in accordance with the way I’m used to doing business,” Hartley said.

Monica Zimmer, spokesperson for Sodexo, said in an email that the allegations that Sodexo engages in unfair labor practices,have no merit.

“A tactic of the SEIU is to file unfair labor practice charges against employers and suggest the charges are evidence of the employer’s wrongdoing,” Zimmer said in an e-mail.

Zimmer said in the same email that Sodexo supports their employees’ right to unionize, but “if the SEIU had the worker support it claims [to have], it would have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a federally-supervised secret ballot election…But the SEIU doesn’t want elections.

It wants theatrical confrontations to erode the trust between Sodexo management, employees and customers and help it attract new members in its ongoing dispute with rival unions.”

According to a report presented by the SEIU to the New Orleans City Council earlier this month, “Sodexo is the market leader in school food service management and sets employment standards for thousands of New Orleanians.”

Jean-Paul Arguello can be reached at [email protected]