|
Sodexho
Decemner 2, 2002
The day Ellen Early walked into her first Diversity Roundtable meeting, she
was confident and ambitious junior executive at Marriot Management
Services. An why not? Her company, the Gaithersburg-based food
and management service conglomerate, was pairing mid-level minority employees
with senior white executives who would show them how to ascend the corporate
ladder. Seven years later, when Early walked into the office of a
Washington law firm, she was an embittered former Marriot employee whose
dreams of success had evaporated. The Diversity Roundtable, she had
concluded, was a sham, designed to appease blacks without delivering the
positions they sought, the ones with bigger paychecks, stock options and
company cars. What Early and dozen other black managers at the
100,000-employee company, now known as Sodexho Inc., started that day in 1999
has become one of the nation's largest class-action race discrimination suits
as well as an uneasy story of its era. The plaintiffs allege that
Sodexho has a "pattern and practice" of denying blacks promotions
and deserved advancements. (Washington Post)
August 29,
2002
In simpler times, university students rarely accused campus food-services
suppliers of anything worse than serving lumpy mashed potatoes. But
Sodexho Alliance SA, a global food-service company that feeds students on
more than 900 U.S. campuses, faces a much trickier complaint. The
French company has been the target during the past three years of a campaign
by student activists on dozens of U.S. campuses who object to Sodexho's
involvement in managing prisons. Feeding college students ia a core business for Sodexho, while prison-related
activities account for about 1% of annual revenue. Yet Sodexho is
refusing to back down. Although it has sold its stake in a U.S. prison
operator, Sodexho is quietly expanding its prison businesses elsewhere in the
world. Sodexho's two big global competitors, Britain's Compass Group
PLC and U.S. based Aramark Corp.,
both provide food service to prisoners but don't manage prisons. In
1994, Sodexho bought a stake in Corrections Corp. of America, a big U.S.
operator of prisons. That link to American prisons inflamed passions on
U.S. campuses, and Sodexho sold the stake last year. Sodexho still
manages prisons in Britain and Australia and is helping to develop new ones
in Chile. It also hopes to bid for further prison contract in Germany
and Portugal. In Australia, Sodexho has run afoul of government
officials on two contracts. The Victoria state government two years ago
took control of a women's prison at Deer Park after finding the operator, a
company then 50%-owned by Sodexho, "was failing fundamental security and
drug-prevention. Since then, Sodexho has acquired 100% of the
Australian company, known as AIMS. Sodexho's AIMS unit also has drawn
fire for its handling of a contract under which it transports prisoners
between jails and courtrooms in Western Australia. The state's
inspector of custodial services said in a report in October that prisoners
sometimes suffered unnecessary hardships during transport, including stifling
heat and inadequate toilet facilities in vans. Mr. Pranis
argues that governments imprison too many people instead if finding
alternatives. For-profit prisons, he says, create a powerful lobby to
build more of them. "These companies depend on a steady flow of
bodies to keep going," Mr. Pranis says.
(Wall Street Journal)
1114 Brandt Drive
Tallahassee, FL 32308
(850) 222-3329  Fax: (850) 561-0192
Special thanks to the Florida PBA for sponsoring our webpage.
|