I don’t usually engage in snarky posts, but every once in a while, I need a little snark to put a ridiculous situation into perspective. So please indulge me for the next three minutes…
It’s a good thing the government’s taken over the student loan industry. Now our precious young college students will receive every opportunity to spend hours learning in the college classroom, enlightening their minds and enriching their lives.
Oh wait, no, that’s not how that “free money” is spent. Why use our hard earned tax dollars for an education when you can waste our money and spend that time instead on becoming a pawn in someone else’s propaganda? Why not abuse the money that’s been confiscated from our paychecks at a time when we so desperately need it and instead enjoy the benefits of union indoctrination on your college campus?
So let me get this straight. Students all across the country have suddenly all taken a collective interest in the economic performance of their university’s cafeteria? So, instead of attending classes like grateful students excited to learn, they’re sitting in the middle of a busy intersection at a red light, arm in arm, donning their SEIU-provided purple shirt, blocking traffic and taking cops away from important things – like responding to emergencies. And last week, 20 were arrested for doing this at Ohio State University.
Well, there must be a perfectly good reason, right? Not really. If you follow the “research” SEIU publishes, you’d think that Sodexo is trying to kill off innocent Americans by tainting the food supply. That’s more an organizing tactic than it is factual information that supports a real safety issue. They’ve been doing that for months with the grade school cafeteria workers. And if you listen to the protesters, the reasons, if they can offer any, are a bit of a stretch. Here, they’re protesting in part that Sodexo isn’t offering full-time work to stadium employees. Students in the second video disrupt a basketball game to make their point. While in the first video, workers and students joined together to rally “for justice.” As one gentleman in the first video explained, the company only gives him hours to work during football season and basketball season. But he wants full-time hours and feels that Sodexo should give him that.
Have these college kids not noticed that they go home on long breaks throughout the year? Are they aware that stadiums have downtime? No students, no events. No sports season, no events. No spectators, no events. No events, no full-time hours. Maybe they should explain that to the workers.
If you haven’t been following SEIU’s all-out war against Sodexo for the last 18 months, let me give you the crash course. Sodexo is a food service and facilities management company that provides cafeteria and cleaning services at many of the nation’s companies, schools, event facilities and athletic stadiums. The company’s 110,000 employees in the US (plus even more in international locations) have long been a been a prime target for SEIU’s organizing attempts. In the “old days”, colleges and universities hired food and cleaning service workers as direct employees. But as that need has declined over the years with all the food establishment choices available today, more and more schools now outsource their food and cleaning services in an effort to leverage those cost savings to avoid making cuts to students’ educational programs. Organized labor has of course pushed back. SEIU’s been pummeling Sodexo with their corporate campaign tactics through the usual outlets – the smear website, the manufactured “studies” from affiliates and allies, the strategically times press releases, the coordinated protests, sit-ins and international delegations, and all the drummed-up issues…
Whew. No wonder Andy Stern said he was bored. It’s all so overdone. The same old tired routines. The same old manufactured outrage.
But today, in these days of Bailout Bingo, when We the Taxpayers are picking up the tab for all these antics, as many of these students are lucky enough to attend college thanks to public subsidies, while others (like me) were left to their own means of working their way through school, the American people aren’t yawning anymore. We’re tired too. We’re tired of subsidizing government propaganda (unions are just an extension of this government) and watching people march around like a bunch of spoiled brats. But we’re tired of letting this happen.
Perhaps it’s time we all started supporting the Sodexo’s of our nation, with our own dollars from our own pockets. And do it wearing red, white and blue – en masse. It’s a much nicer look than that tired, old, worn-out sea of purple.