By all accounts she was doing nothing wrong, certainly nothing illegal. So she was surprised when her supervisor, Eisa Shukran, approached her and told her she couldn’t display the contract or any other union literature on campus.

Shukran proceed to harass, intimidate, coerce and restrain Porsuk from participating in union activities, according to court documents obtained by Think. Two days later the union filed a suit against Lackmann with the National Labor Relations Board, and ultimately won minor concessions from the company.

While much of our collective attention has been paid to the ongoing labor disputes in the Midwest—in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana—the attack on unions has been slowly building for years right here on campus.

The case of Ayse Porsuk is just one example of what Local 1102 Director of Collective Bargaining Dennis Romano sees as a quickly deteriorating relationship between his union and Stony Brook University’s contractors.

“I have to tell you, it’s always been tough negotiations with Lackmann,” he said. “That’s fine, I expect that. But it’s more than that now, it’s more of a contentious situation than in the past. That troubles me.”

Stony Brook University’s current relationship with Lackmann began in 2009, when the Faculty Student Association, the semi-autonomous organization responsible for negotiating and signing all of the university’s major contracts, chose the Woodbury-based company to replace outgoing food service provider Chartwells. That summer, they began operations at most of the on-campus dining centers.

Romano says that almost as soon as Lackmann took over, the attitude towards his union and its members changed noticeably.

“Things became different when Lackmann came in,” he said. “We didn’t have these issues with Chartwells. And then Lackmann came in and wanted to change things. Right from the get-go we saw things were changing. Different management teams, different ways of doing things.”

Negotiations that had previously been merely tough became outright hostile. When Local 1102 went to negotiate the contracts of a relatively small group of workers at two auxiliary services at Hofstra University, where Lackmann also holds a contract, they were met with stiff resistance from the leadership at Lackmann.

“They ran an anti-union campaign that you would expect to see with a new union. The employer they got to run it got very aggressive,” said Romano.

Lackmann management disputes the notion that they are being aggressive at all with workers at Stony Brook.

“Lackmann has informed FSA that they are not taking a hard line against union activities,” said Angela Agnello, the Director of Marketing and Communications for the Faculty Student Association.

If that sounds at all dubious, it’s because despite provisions written into FSA contracts that contractors have to abide by fair labor practices, there is no independent agency or committee within Stony Brook University or the FSA to independently investigate claims of workers’ rights violations or any other ethically questionable practices. They are by and large left to take contractors at their word.

Which raises serious questions about the relationship between the Faculty Student Association and its contractors. Just how much control is handed over to private companies at an otherwise public university?

The answer, it seems, is quite a lot. Lackmann not only manages the facilities on campus but they are also the employer for hundreds of workers in each of the campus dining facilities managed by Lackmann. In other words, most food service workers are not university employees.

It’s a model that was adopted in order to shield the Faculty Student Association—and by extension, Stony Brook University—from liability associated with, among other things, labor disputes like the ones currently facing Lackmann Culinary Services.

“Campus Dining employees are employees of Lackmann,” confirmed Angela Agnello. When asked directly whether these workers should be the concern of the FSA and Stony Brook University, she responded: “The food service staff is hired, paid, and provided benefits by Lackmann.”

“I think the university absolutely has a responsibility to all its workers on campus,” said Jackie Hayes, a graduate student at the University at Albany who has studied the history of SUNY and their relationship with auxiliary companies like FSA.

“Anyone can kind of see they work for the university in everything but name,” said Hayes.

At Albany, anti-union measures taken by their food service provider Chartwells in 2009 led to a student-organized campaign against the administration and the University Auxiliary Services (Albany’s equivalent of our FSA) to demand the university take some responsibility for the treatment of these workers. Students successfully applied pressure on Chartwells, who backed down their campaign.

Stony Brook University and the Faculty Student Association are still holding firm on the notion that food service workers are not university personnel and thereby not entitled to the same protections as university employees.

When we pressed FSA on whether food service workers should receive protection from the university if Lackmann continues to act aggressively towards its own employees, we were simply referred back to their statements that these were not university employees. The implication was clear: the answer is no.

“That’s basically them taking this cowardly and cheap route to make their administration jobs slightly easier,” said Hayes.

While there is little the FSA can do to directly improve the conditions of workers on campus, they have any number of means to pressure Lackmann management to make those changes.

“[The FSA] absolutely can cut the contract before it’s end,” said Hayes of the university’s contract with Lackmann. “If they’re not meeting the standards that the university has set they can say ‘we don’t want your business anymore’.”

It’s not just the treatment of their workers that Lackmann controls at Stony Brook. To an alarming degree, Lackmann managers—who by their own admission are not public employees and not affiliated with the university—are able to dictate policy on campus as well.

For example, according to two student food service employees who both asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprimands by their supervisors, it is Lackmann and not the FSA that sets media policy in the dining halls they manage. FSA then enforces that policy.

The policy was on display on April 29, when this reporter attempted to photograph workers in the kitchen of the Union Commons. After receiving permission from a student manager, a Lackmann manager approached me and demanded I leave. Before I could oblige, the manager also asked me to delete any photos I had taken. I did not comply. I was then asked to produce my student ID (again, I did not comply, as the manager is not a university employee), and was then threatened with campus police. At no point was a university employee notified of the situation.

While the Faculty Student Association may be comfortable turning a blind eye, the university may not have a choice over their involvement soon. Local 1102 is getting ready for the next significant negotiation with Lackmann, this time over the contract of cooks that service the university. If the union faces similar campaigns that Lackmann has waged in the recent past, Dennis Romano plans on making the negotiations FSA’s business.

“In the event that things don’t change, I will certainly make the FSA aware of any labor unrest that may occur,” he said.

Ironically, Local 1102 is also the union that represents FSA’s own clerical employees, so Romano and the rest of the union have experience with direct negotiations with the administration of the Faculty Student Association. Unlike Lackmann, says Romano, the FSA has always conducted negotiations in good faith.

For its part, the FSA believes there are already ample ways for workers to raise the alarm if they feel their rights are being violated.

“To the best of our knowledge, employees have options for grievance hearings, arbitration and recourse with the National Labor Relations Board under that contract and under Federal Law,” said Agnello.

Access to the National Labor Relations Board is evident in the growing litany of cases being brought against Lackmann by workers at Stony Brook. In addition to the case of Ayse Porsuk, Lackmann has also been party to suits in 2008 and now again in 2011.

According to NLRB Board Agent Noemi Wasserstrom, another suit was filed by Local 1102 on April 8 against Lackmann on behalf of the truck drivers that service Stony Brook University.

“It comes down to lack of benefits, wages, working condition, general overall treatment. Specifically, they are not paid accordingly,” said Romano.

As for the most recent case (the one involving Ayse Porsuk), court-mandated bulletins were posted at the entrance to every dining hall where unionized employees work stating that Lackmann managers would not engage in anti-union behavior. They hung there for at least 60 days, until mid-April. By then, Eisa Shukran, the manager named in the case, had left his job. We asked the FSA what the circumstances were surrounding his departure, and were not given any specifics.

“FSA does not comment on personnel issues,” said Agnello. “Lackmann has informed FSA that Mr. Shukran left Stony Brook to accept another position.”

That position is as the Compass Group District Manager for the area encompassing, among other things, Stony Brook University. Shukran left to take a promotion.

Emma Backfish, a Stony Brook University senior, winced as she dropped a plate covered in tortilla chips, sour cream and crumpled napkins into the garbage during lunch time on a Tuesday morning in early October.

“I can’t believe I even ate that,” she said. “I know it’s bad, but we really don’t have a choice.”

Backfish’s concerns echo those of fellow Stony Brook students – many feel that the food on campus is both disgusting and expensive, but they have no choice but to eat it.

Stony Brook University has had problems for years with student unrest regarding food prices, quality and variety of food available on campus. Chartwells, which had provided Stony Brook with campus food for years, was infamously known by students for charging high prices for its food, such as the price of salad by the ounce. It was clear that students were dissatisfied with the service. When there was a new contract opening for food services at Stony Brook, it was not Chartwells, but Lackmann Culinary Services that won an excruciating bidding process to provide dining services in the campus for the coming years.

Officials said that the bidding process itself took months and involved meetings with potential campus food providers, trips out of state and drafting detailed plans. “The bid took place to be fair to all the competition,” said Dawn Villacci, Faculty Student Association representative and customer advocate in charge of organizing the bid committee. “We wanted to offer new programs because we knew students were unhappy with the quality of dining on campus.”

The bid committee was made up of 14 students, including undergraduate chair Abhi Bikkani. These students took visits to other state schools including University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Rhode Island and the University of Connecticut, said Bikkani. The committee tasted food and interacted directly with each other to draft a contract before it was presented to Lackmann. The intent was to see if Stony Brook could house an “all you can eat style service,” which each of these colleges had. Surveys Villacci conducted among students suggested that a buffet style was something students wanted.

Chartwells, had its contract extended—much to the students’ dismay–to let the bidding process play out. “It was very important to explore all the options, we needed more time,” Villacci said.

After visiting schools around the Northeast and meeting with several culinary providers, the bid committee found that Stony Brook did not have a large enough facility to have hundreds of students eating at once.

“At Stony Brook University, our students are used to flexibility,” Villacci said. “You can’t bring things out of all you can eat. Our students need to be able to take things on the go.” In an all you can eat buffet style dining hall, leaving the hall with food is not permitted. As a result, the months of visits and meetings with buffet style culinary providers became useless. The committee decided it was more practical to stay with a full retail plan to provide more flexibility.

The surveys and interactions with students that took place with representatives of the Faculty Student Association found that Stony Brook students had three main concerns regarding the new campus food provider on campus. These concerns included having a more “hands on” customer service atmosphere, advancing environmental concerns and lowering prices on campus. A Meal Plan Resolution Committee was also created as a forum with the hopes that the new provider could fix problems right away.

“Students had many concerns but obviously, due to the economy, their ability to stay on budget was a huge issue,” said Villacci. “They’d either have many meal points left at the end of the semester or none at all. There was very little in between, and this made students upset.”

According to both Bikkani and Villacci, one of the main reasons Lackmann was chosen was because it provided the soundest plan to help students stay on budget. Lackmann is providing combination meals daily for a fixed price as well as displaying signs suggesting meals that are “budget friendly.” In addition to the signs there are placards by the register describing how many points students should have at this week in the semester to stay on track with specific meal plans until the semester’s end.

Both Villacci and Bikkani praised Lackmann for its work in crafting a budget for its students. However the small signs by the register that provide insight into meal point usage are eclipsed by boxes of candy, are outdated or are falling off. The signs are so small that when asked if they had seen them, six out of ten students said they hadn’t and out of the remaining four, two said they hadn’t read them.

Lackmann and the committee prided themselves on its program known as “three under three,” meaning that the meal was under $3 and 300 calories. These snacks include small wraps, fruit and desserts in on-the-go containers.

Villacci said another aspect important to the committee was the availability of “grab and go items.” After the research revealed that students had to be able to take the food with them to their dorms or activities on or off campus, the idea of fresh grab and go food was central to Lackmann’s plan.

According to Joseph Rudolph, the Stony Brook representative for Lackmann, the main idea was keeping all the food and production local in order to lower prices overall.

“Our motto is that we are fresh, local and focused,” Rudolph said. “We have moved the production of many things that used to be outsourced on campus. Grab and go is all manufactured here, and we began two fresh bakeries on campus, one in the Union and one in Kelly Quad.”

Though the idea was to bring higher quality at a lower price by baking bread buns, cookies and snacks on campus, students are not impressed.

“The food is not exactly good,” said Maria Del Mar Piedrabuena, a senior Women’s Studies and journalism major. “The other day I got chicken pot pie at the Student Activities Center and it had one piece of chicken and one carrot. It was six dollars! It was so disgusting, I had to throw it out.”

Lackmann also provides food to Adelphi University, Hofstra University and SUNY New Paltz. The company is supported by Compass, Inc, the same company providing money to Chartwells.

“We are two separate, independent companies,” said Rudolph. “Compass allows us to do what we want, they don’t interfere. They manage $20 billion internationally. They told us ‘Do your business, we’re here to support you’.”

Many students couldn’t even tell that there was a new provider on campus. While it was evident when the campus switched from Coca-Cola to Pepsi a year earlier, students seemed to believe the campus was just adding new concepts and not really changing anything comprehensively.

Living on campus, Frank Loiacono, a senior Engineering student from Manhattan, said he had no choice but to eat campus food. “Seven dollars for a sandwich is ridiculous,” he complained. Though Loiacono has a car, he said it is often hard to get off campus on breaks between classes and that trekking back to his dorm in Kelly is both time consuming and pointless to make his own food in such a short amount of time.

“I asked for ham and turkey, so they gave me half of each,” he said of his sandwich purchased from the Union deli. “They used to give me double the size of what a regular sandwich would be.”

Rudolph was optimistic about how students would react to Lackmann’s performance during its first year at Stony Brook University. “We encourage feedback with comments,” he said. “We have management photos posted and encourage that if there is an issue, to take it straight to the manager. It is very important to us to bring higher level service, service with a smile and to provide an eating facility that reflects these values.”

Lackmann is in the process of retraining the staff to provide “hospitable service” to the student body, Rudolph said. The entire staff that worked under Chartwells was hired under Lackmann. “We have to create a consumer-friendly culture in our facilities,” Rudolph said. “It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.”

For now, students say prices are high, food quality is low and food even runs out in certain places on campus during the weekend. When Rudolph was asked about this he said, “I did not know about that. It is important that students keep us involved and tell us about these things. We want to know what you think.”

The Faculty/Student Association formally announced yesterday that campus dining, long a target of student criticism, would switch contractors over the summer from Compass Group’s Chartwells to Lackmann Culinary Services.

But before you applaud the change, a few things to keep in mind. Stony Brook used to contract with Lackmann, a local dining service based out of Woodbury, Long Island, but they lost their contract in 1982 after a contentious bid dispute with the FSA. The contract was awarded to DAKA, which has since been acquired by the Compass Group.

And then there’s the matter of Lackmann’s current contracts. Several other colleges and universities use Lackmann in their dining halls, and the reviews from students have been less than stellar.

The Observer, a student newspaper at Broward College, is no fan of Lackmann, and the university’s Student Government Association (the equivalent of Stony Brook’s Undergraduate Student Government) has been pushing for changes.

Same at Hofstra, where there is even a student group (Students Amending Lackmann Associated Dining) that was created to address the shortcomings of their campus dining, also run by Lackmann. And in an editorial published in the Hofstra Chronicle, students allege that Lackmann and Hofstra’s dining services were failing to provide students with receipts upon request (as required by law), and that fraudulent charges to meal cards of both students and faculty went unresolved. (Hofstra officials responded to the charges in a follow-up letter to the editor, calling the charges unsubstantiated. Shocker.)

THiNK Magazine has yet to do its own reporting into the matter, so it would be unfair of us to pass judgment on Lackmann. And student complaints about campus dining are not exactly rare occurrences, no matter at which university or what food service provider holds the contract.

But there are several questions that should be answered. THiNK Magazine will keep an eye on this developing story, and hopefully so will the other campus publications (all of which have yet to report on this, oddly. Get on it, guys!)

Stay with THiNK and the InTuition blog for our own original reporting.

With the University’s beverage contract up at the end of the semester, and the food service contract set to end at the end of this year, Stony Brook was looking at some major changes. Recently, however, the food service contract has been extended by a year, to June 2009.

 Chartwell’s is the current food service provider on campus, and has been for the past ten years. Chartwell’s is a subsidiary of Compass Group, a multinational corporation based in the UK, and controls every cafeteria on the west campus except for Jasmine’s in the Wang Center. The contract, which was supposed to expire at the end of this year, by the end of June, has been extended by a year to allow the Bid Selection Committee more time to do a thorough analysis of a potential change to the meal plan on campus.

 The change in the meal plan involves a possible new system of unlimited access, with an initial card swipe in the beginning. This proposed system is similar to the brunches at Kelly and Benedict Dining Halls on the weekend, in that a set beginning price would allow meal plan users all-you-can-eat while they were in the cafeteria. The year extension was given so that the Bid Selection Committee, comprised of members of the Faculty Student Association (FSA), administration, student government and faculty, could determine the feasibility of this new system at each cafeteria. For example, the SAC will remain the full a la carte selection that it currently is due to the large number of faculty and commuter student traffic, but cafeterias like The Union Commons and Kelly Dining Hall could be converted to the new system with changes and renovations. The Bid Selection Committee has also discussed renovating Kelly Dining Hall, to accommodate for more seating and other necessary changes.

The new deadline for the bid, which will be determined later, will fall in the range of Novermber to early December. Expected bidders include Sodexho, ARAMARK, Lackmann and Chartwell’s again.