Dining workers at Rollins College will get a rerun union election following allegations of anti-union tactics

Dining workers at Rollins College, an affluent private institution just outside Orlando, will get a second union election, following allegations of union-busting during the initial organizing campaign.

The regional director for the National Labor Relations Board ordered the new election last week citing the employer's failure to provide certain information to the union ahead of the election.

Workers in the college’s dining halls, employed by contractor Sodexo, first began organizing with the hospitality union Unite Here in 2022. They officially filed a petition with the federal labor board for a union election last April.

After waiting months for an election date, in part stalled by a hearing over alleged violations of federal labor law by their employer, workers in the college’s cafeterias and cafes narrowly voted against unionizing November in a 39-33 vote.

Unite Here challenged the results shortly after, filing a series of objections to the election alleging Sodexo violated provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, including specific election rules.

Regional director for the National Labor Relations Board David Cohen dismissed some of these objections in a decision released last week — including one that relied on a quote published in an Orlando Weekly article about a sous-chef who threatened to “call the police” on union organizers who approached her after work.

In his order, Cohen said there wasn’t enough evidence to back up the quote.

But Cohen did find merit in one of the union’s objections — specifically, one pertaining to Sodexo’s failure to provide the union with a complete list of workers who were eligible to vote in the union election, complete with information about the workers’ shifts.

That is required under federal law.

That violation alone, Cohen decided, is enough to merit an election rerun.

Eric Clinton, president of Unite Here Local 362 in Orlando, told Orlando Weekly in a phone call this week that the union's “pleased” with Cohen’s decision.

“We’re thankful that in this country, workers have the right to exercise democracy, whether or not they get to form a union, and that's what will ultimately end up happening here,” said Clinton, whose union represents thousands of workers at Disney World (including food service workers officially employed by Sodexo) and other employers throughout the region.

Cohen and the National Labor Relations Board did not make definitive rulings on any of Unite Here's allegations of union-busting behavior by Sodexo managers and supervisors at Rollins College.

There were seven objections made by the union that Cohen didn’t make any sort of decision on. He determined that doing so was “unnecessary,” since the one objection that he sustained will trigger the new election, according to the order.

Clinton, the union president, declined to comment on Cohen’s dismissal of some of their objections. At this point, Clinton said they’re waiting for more information from the NLRB.

There is no official rerun election date yet, per the order, which states that such information, as well as other election details, will be determined at a “later date.” The date for such a determination is not clarified.

Clinton guessed that the second election is unlikely to occur before the end of the current semester at Rollins College in May.

Based on the fact that it took months for the regional NLRB to set an election date the first time around — that’s a fair guess.

Dining workers at Rollins College officially went public with their campaign last February, telling Orlando Weekly that they were organizing to advocate for better pay — particularly for longtime workers who sometimes made less than new hires — as well as fairer scheduling practices and better healthcare benefits.

One worker told Orlando Weekly that during a visit to a co-worker’s home, a cramped space housing herself and her four children, their co-worker broke down crying, devastated she wasn't able to afford to take her young daughter out for her birthday.

“That shouldn't be a luxury you have to beg your employer to afford,” said Vincent Padden, a formerly full-time employee who (when we spoke) had to revert to part-time work to be able to take on other jobs that could pay more. “You should be able to take your little baby out for her birthday.”

Padden and some of his other co-workers also told Orlando Weekly last year that many of their co-workers were scared to discuss unions, worried they’d become a target.

“Nobody will talk to you,” said Padden last February. “It has taken me weeks to be able to just talk to her about how her day was,” he said of one co-worker.

Over the course of the organizing drive, other workers alleged manipulative tactics used by management to try and crush pro-union sentiment among employees.

Some of these are described in the union's objections to the election results, including those that that NLRB regional director Cohen either overruled or decided not to make a ruling on.

This included allegations of management telling a worker to remove a pro-union pin (a potentially unlawful act) and threatening to fire a worker if they voted in favor of unionization (definitely illegal, if substantiated).

Management also appeared to have orchestrated a “No Union” rally last April. At the rally, a senior food supervisor passed out anti-union shirts and directed workers to march around the tiny college campus, chanting anti-union messages.

The supervisor told the gathered employees blatant lies about unions, such as the process for initiating a strike. She also spread falsehoods about Unite Here, such as falsely inflating staffers’ salaries (which are public record).

The supervisor told Orlando Weekly she and others paid for the anti-union T-shirts themselves, out of their own pockets, but the union alleged in their laundry list of objections over the first election’s results that the shirts were actually paid for by Sodexo.

Mateo Herrera, a pro-union worker, later described that rally to us as “bullshit,” and said they believed some workers were directed by their higher-ups to join the rally while on the clock.

A majority of the dining hall workers at Rollins College — an institution that charges students hundreds to thousands of dollars for even the cheapest meal plans — are people of color, and many are immigrants with limited English-speaking skills, further narrowing their job prospects outside the work they do at Rollins.

Students and faculty at the college organized several rallies in support of a democratic union election process for the dining workers last year — and were surveilled by campus security on golf carts.

A spokesperson for the college told Orlando Weekly last February that the college “supports employees’ right to discuss unionization.” That was about all they had to say about it.

The college, which expended $9.65 million on dining services in 2022, is a profitable grab for Sodexo, a French food service and facility management company that operates in 45 countries and employs 430,000 employees globally.

The company has a long history of deploying anti-union tactics during organizing drives, as described by Human Rights Watch and Workers United organizer and author Daisy Pitkin in her book, On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union, which documents a union drive by immigrant workers at industrial laundry factories operated by Sodexo in Arizona.

Sodexo  has denied allegations of illegally interfering with their Rollins College employees' protected union rights in statements made to Orlando Weekly.

The process for a second union election at Rollins College is yet to be determined. For the union to be victorious, a simple majority of workers must vote in favor of joining the union. A tie is considered a loss.

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