Northwestern University food and hospitality workers expressed relief at Monday’s Evanston City Council meeting after the council gave preliminary approval to a measure that could save their jobs.
City Council unanimously approved on first reading a Worker’s Retention Ordinance that would guarantee employees hired by a contractor to remain working the same job if a company were to switch contractors.
The ordinance is written in such a way that it primarily impacts workers at Northwestern University’s Evanston campus, according to the city’s Chief Legislative Policy Advisor Liza Robertson-Young.
The City Council approved it through a consent agenda item, meaning that Council members did not need to discuss it before preliminarily approving it. Once it was preliminarily approved, Mayor Daniel Biss congratulated the workers who packed the lobby and overflow room. The Council will need to vote on it for final approval at its upcoming meeting.
Northwestern University representatives did not respond to a request for comment on the ordinance.
Food and hospitality workers and city officials spoke more about the ordinance at an Evanston Human Services Committee meeting on Feb. 5.
“The goal really is to protect workers who are at risk of a contract changing and then not being maintained,” Robertson-Young said. Per a city memo, such an ordinance is already on the books in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Washington D.C. and Baltimore.
Per city documents, the ordinance would address dilemmas that might come about if a business were to hire a new contractor for food and hospitality services. The successor contractor would need to hire the same employees the previous contractor had employed for 90 days. It would only apply to institutions that have more than 200 employees hired by a contractor.
“My understanding is that this is the group of workers (food service workers) that are most at risk of economic displacement when a contract changes,” Robertson-Young said.
The new contractor would need to pay at least the same wages and benefits to the employees for 90 days, per the ordinance. At the end of the period, the contractor would need to offer the employee a job if their performance is satisfactory.
According to Robertson-Young, the ordinance would not apply to hospitals, nor would it apply to Evanston/Skokie School District 65 or Evanston Township High School District 202 because the school districts hire food service workers directly and not through a secondary contractor.
According to Unite Here Local 1 Spokesperson Sarah Lyon, roughly 500 hospitality and food service workers work at Northwestern University and are employed by the Compass Group.
Lyons said when Northwestern switched contracts from Sodexo and Aramark to the Compass Group, the university put the employees’ jobs in limbo.
“Workers had to campaign to save their jobs, living in fear that they would be fired when the new operator took over,” Lyons said.
Dan Abraham, an organizing director from Unite Here Local 1, said the ordinance is a “common sense piece of legislation.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if other municipalities, you know, took up the same concept,” he said.
About 50 employees represented by Unite Here Local 1 packed the Human Services meeting. A few gave public comment in support of the ordinance to the committee.
Veronica Reyes, a food service worker, recalled the contractor switch from 2018. “It was very scary and stressful. We had to fight to make sure we wouldn’t be fired. Without the job, I wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage. I (was) worried that we could lose our home.”
“The Workers’ Retention Ordinance will make sure we continue serving the Northwestern community no matter who the contractor is. This will be a huge relief for me and my family,” Reyes said.
Rosa Villaseñor, who has worked as a housekeeper for 15 years at the James L. Allen Center on Northwestern’s campus, spoke at public comment. The Allen Center is slated to be replaced by a new high-tech building on the lakefront.
“If Northwestern changes contractors when the building that is replacing the Allen Center opens, I could be kicked to the curb,” Villaseñor said. “That feels terrible, and it hurts my heart. No matter who the contractor is, I deserve to continue working at the campus I’ve called home for so many years.”
