Sodexo is a multinational corporation that has control of our campus’s dining hall, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A and Steak and Shake. According to Macrotrends.net, the company has amassed a net worth of almost $14 billion and sprawls across numerous countries. However, Sodexo has a lot of skeletons tucked within their closet.
Sodexo’s website states, “Sodexo does not contract with any prison entities, detention centers, or correctional facilities, public or private, in the United States. Sodexo does not operate any prisons or detention centers in any of the countries with the largest number of prisons.”
Back in 2001, it was revealed that Sodexo was funding and running several private prisons in the United States. After protests across college campuses and six colleges breaking their contracts, Sodexo stopped funding private prisons in the early 2000s … in the United States.
Today, Sodexo operates five private prisons in the UK and supports 84 prisons across nine other countries. In 2016, a woman named Natasha Chin was found in her cell dead. As reported by Independent, she had been vomiting for over nine hours but received no medical attention; she had only been at the prison for 36 hours.
The most common complaint pertaining to Sodexo is that the places they operate are understaffed and the employees are underpaid. These are issues that I think also apply to ETSU.
Sodexo also has very wasteful practices relating to food, with rampant use of plastic packaging and large amounts of waste. The menus are repetitive and lack any kind of variety for people with dietary restrictions. Little gets done to combat these issues but not because Sodexo can’t solve them, but because they don’t seem to care to.
ETSU has a contract with Sodexo for the next several years, but the bottom line is that this corporation only cares about money. Sodexo has been mistreating their workers for years, and by holding a contract with them, ETSU is supporting that.
