Published: February 23, 2010

After six and a half years working for Sodexo Food and Facilities Management Services at Lafayette College, Genevieve Repsher grew tired of earning $8.25 an hour as a cashier in the Farinon Hall cafeteria.

When she showed interest in organizing fellow workers with Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, she found herself followed, watched, interrogated and disciplined by Sodexo management.

That's what she claims in charges the union has filed with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board against the company.

"After six and a half years, I'm literally living paycheck to paycheck," said Repsher, 29, a single mom raising a 4-year-old son in Easton. "We would like to get livable wages."

She said the company's 3 percent annual raise doesn't pay the bills.

"We've gone without heat (at home)," she said Monday.

"We're trying to organize but management is trying to shut us down."

Repsher said she was "written up" for talking with other workers about "unrelated matters," noting that management did not use the word "union" in the disciplinary notice.

Repsher said employees are supposed to get three warnings.

"The third one results in termination. They skipped the first and went straight to the second. That's illegal," she said.

A union official said Repsher is correct, adding that other workers have also told union representatives stories of intimidation.

He said Sodexo has about 1,200 employees in the area, including the Newark area and at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Muhlenberg in Bethlehem, where a similar complaint has been filed.

"This is pretty typical of an employer like Sodexo," said Matt Painter, a union spokesman. "They see it as the cost of doing business. The penalties aren't really strong enough to dissuade this kind of behavior."

Painter described one example of penalties meted out against companies equivalent to forcing them to "put up a poster saying, 'You have the right to organize.'"

Sodexo, which has U.S. headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., did not return several phone calls seeking comment on the complaint.

The company works as a contractor for Lafayette and the hospital, but the location is not responsible for the company's employment policies, Painter said.

Dorothy Moore-Duncan, regional director of NLRB in Washington, D.C., could not comment on the specifics of the Lafayette complaint other than to confirm the agency is working on one.

"Whether or not that has merit will be determined by an investigation," she said.

She said deadlines for when an investigation should be completed are determined by the seriousness of the complaint. There are three categories, with No. 1 being the least serious and No. 3 being most serious.

"This is a category three," Moore-Duncan said, adding that the labor board has 49 days from the original filing date to complete the investigation.

Moore-Duncan could not confirm receiving the hospital complaint, but it has a later filing date and might not have made it through the system yet.

"We do have other charges from around the country involving Sodexo," she said.

Repsher said, "We're not trying to start any trouble. They're afraid we're trying to gain power. It's not about that. We just want to earn a living wage."

According to the Sodexo Web site, the company employs 380,000 workers in 80 countries. Its home offices are in France.