Editor,
Past: Public universities directly hired work study students to work in eateries in Student Union buildings. Food was mainly real and cooked and inexpensive. Being essentially government jobs, there was job security.
Present: Private, for-profit franchise partners of giant parent megacorps run SUB food outlets — their prices well over what they used to be after getting the foot in the door and opened up hiring to outsiders. Students get to compete with them, even as these the companies themselves (often contracting themselves to a large corporation in turn that has obtained an exclusive from bidding with the University and winning the contract mainly for having “presented the best plan for risk management,” thereby absolving the University of liability. A lot of so-called food is junk, and aisles in many of their monopolized outlets on campus look mainly like 7-Eleven.
Future?: Even more layering beneath profiteering contractor (still called dining services) hiring subcontractors hiring sub-subcontractors to manage and run on-campus eateries, to where almost all the steep price of a food item goes to pure middlemen getting a cut from someone else’s cut from somebody’s lower slice of the shrinking product pie. To feed all these layers of companies above them, more weight as time pressure and wage suppression is planted on the backs of the low-paid counter Janes and Joes... until where they just quit and campus food stores are completely replaced by vending machines with robot versions doing the catering. The megacorp that’s now taken over the government campus also sighs with relief because there’s no more liability from customer slip-n-fall and no more workers’ compensation to be paid off.
Sincerely,
Arun Anand Ahuja
UNM student
Editor’s note: Six of the contracted eateries located in UNM’s SUB — Satellite Coffee, Saggio’s, Times Square Deli, Sahara, Blake’s Lotaburger and Garcia’s — are locally owned and operated businesses. Mandalay Express is not, while Chartwells operates the Mercado and Chick-fil-A. According to SUB Retail Operations Director Melissa Madrid, the individual contractors provide the employees for their own units while Chartwells — which is not locally owned — provides its employees.
