A group of students crashed U of T’s 175 birthday celebration, cranking up the pressure in a ongoing campaign to get university administrators to dump Sodexho, the company that operates many U of T cafeterias.

The protests, held on November 16, were deliberately timed so as to coincide with the Nobel Prize Centennial Lectures at Convocation Hall. Students stood outside Convocation Hall at 9:00 am, handing out leaflets, then they went to Sid Smith and Robarts with a megaphone. They say Sodexho wokers only make the legal minimum wage, which is not enough to live on, and they are also troubled by the lack of variety in food on the most diverse campus in Canada. They claim that Sodexho does not provide adequate vegan, organic, halal, kosher and other culturally appropriate food options.

Anti-Corporate Rule Action Group (ACRAG), which staged the protests, also noted that Sodexho has the lowest rate of unionization amongst major food service contractors and has been cited in the US for numerous labour code violations.

“I think it was good in terms of making people nervous,” said Student Administrative Council VP Education Lindsay Tabah of the protest. Tabah said they went through the allowed steps and talked to the right people within the university administration, but ultimately they felt that a different sort of action needed to be taken.

The main objective of ACRAG’s protests was to make U of T consider implementing a new food plan, rather than maintaining a contract with Sodexho. Currently, U of T’s contract with the food supplier runs until 2006.

“This is an issue that will not go away,” said Matthew Hill, a member of ACRAG.

Sodexho is a Paris-based multinational food service agency. In 1998, it took over Marriott Management Services in a bid to become the largest food service provider in North America. It operates in refugee detention centres and private prisons out of the UK and Europe; it also owned shares in Corporate Corrections of America until it divested after campus protests were held across the United States.

—With files from Kelly Holloway