Senate Votes to Privatize Its Failing Restaurants

Source: Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801765.html?hpid=topnews


Senate Votes To Privatize Its Failing Restaurants

The Senate Dining Room is the most upscale of the chamber's restaurants. The food service is losing money, and many prefer to eat on the House side. Year after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate's network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money ....The financial condition ...has become so dire that, without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won't make payroll next month......The embarrassment of the Senate food service struggling like some neighborhood pizza joint has quietly sparked change previously unthinkable for Democrats. Last week, in a late-night voice vote, the Senate agreed to privatize the operation of its food service, a decision that would, for the first time, put it under the control of a contractor and all but guarantee lower wages and benefits for the outfit's new hires.

.....

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Rules and Administrations Committee, which oversees the operation of the Senate, said she had no choice.....In a masterful bit of understatement, Feinstein blamed "noticeably subpar" food and service. Foot traffic bears that out. Come lunchtime, many Senate staffers trudge across the Capitol and down into the basement cafeteria on the House side. On Wednesdays, the lines can be 30 or 40 people long. House staffers almost never cross the Capitol to eat in the Senate cafeterias. "It's so bad that the Senate hasn't yet figured out that House 'Taco Salad Wednesday' trumps any type of entree they have to offer,"....In the past 10 years, only 20 new items have been added to the Senate menus.

....Operation of the House cafeterias was privatized in the 1980s by a Democratic-controlled Congress. ....The company wins high praise from most staffers and lawmakers, who say they are pleased with the wide variety of new items offered every few months. Most important to Feinstein, Restaurant Associates turns a substantial profit -- paying $1.2 million in commissions to the House since 2003.
....

In a closed-door meeting with Democrats in November, she was practically heckled by her peers for suggesting it, senators and aides said. "I know what happens with privatization. Workers lose jobs, and the next generation of workers make less in wages. These are some of the lowest-paid workers in our country, and I want to help them," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a staunch labor union ally, said recently. The wages of the approximately 100 Senate food service workers average $37,000 annually. Feinstein made another presentation May 7, warning senators that if they did not agree to turn over the operation to a private contractor, prices would be increased 25 percent across the board. .......Eventually, Democrats agreed to pass legislation that includes guarantees for who go to work for Restaurant Associates. They would retain their current salaries and federal health and pension benefits. Employees who choose to leave instead would receive buyout packages of as much as $25,000 -- paid by the Senate. Half the current employees are likely to take that deal. New employees, however, will not receive federal benefits, though they will be allowed to unionize.

......

In the final days of negotiations, Feinstein rolled her eyes and took a deep breath before explaining the ordeal that the Senate Restaurants had become for her. "It's clearly not the sort of thing that I ran for the Senate to do," she said. "But somebody has to do it."




Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801765.html?hpid=topnews

And it seems that there are guarentees for those who currently work for the cafeteria along with the ability to unionize for the people who get hired after the transition.


I'm all for having some place handy to meet for lunch having work in a downtown office building. Hopefully SEIU will get to organize the union in the cafeteria!

They should merge the two.

One cafeteria should do. At least have the same management run both.

And eliminating the jobs that come along with consolidation?

.. the devil is in the details.


The increased workload may require shifting workers. There may be a way to accomplish it with minimum impact on workers.

I'll plead ignorance on specifics.

It takes about twelve minutes to walk from one Senate building to the House building.

the excersise. and we (the taxpayers) can save some money!

nt

and privatization works so well everywhere else in government. god save us from MBA's and lawyers that can't get a job anywhere except in legislation.

Those cafeterias should be paid for by tax dollars. There needs to be clear SES GAO oversight together with all the vendor bid management that GAO requires, and a real management plan. If the goal is to make them "for profit" or "break even", that's inappropriate. The goal should be to provide convenient food service to our nation's senior legislators.

What's so difficult about that?

when we have appx. 37 million Americans living under the poverty line (that's sure to go up in this economy -- that stat was 2007), food banks increasingly taxed by Americans who can't afford to feed their families, American children who go hungry for lack of $$$ for food, cuts in school breakfast & lunch programs....why the hell do we need to be subsidizing restaurants for these well-paid people?

I'm willing to send each of my legislators and their staffers a package of brown bags -- there's my subsidy offer. They can pack their fucking lunches like millions of hard-working Americans do so that they have "convenient" and affordable food.

I do agree with you though - brown bag meals would be acceptable, generally speaking. I do NOT think that cafeteria dining should be four star food service.

About those 37 million people. We aren't going to feed them with the senate cafeteria budget, in either case. Starving our senators to feel some sense of equity with people living below the poverty line is not productive. If you want to feed those people, let's talk about feeding them, which has nothing AT ALL to do with senate cafeterias.

Also, we have the assumption that our legislature is rich. The point of having some amenities available, just as we do in some jobs here in the U.S. is that they are working stiffs and a subsidized food chain is part of their income if they choose to use it.

Finally, beyond the subsidy, we also subsidize secret service and security for these "well paid" people. It's part of their "total" compensation. If they said somebody was earning too much and should earn less, can you imagine the perception? That is essentially what we would be saying about them.

Finally #2 (sorry), Federal and State budgets are two different things. In Texas our legislature meets once every two years for six weeks, we have outrageous personal property taxes and no income tax, and if you mention a state income tax here they will peel the skin off your 'nads with a dull spork and then set you on fire.

Every median income district school here in the Dallas area has permanent annex trailers, and we pay the ISD school budgets out of the property tax assessments. If we want to subsidize feeding kids in school and feeding families away from school, then we by god need to consider even a 1% state income tax. What we have now isn't working with Texas being 49th or 50th in nearly every negative educational and social program rating. The senate budget has NOTHING to do with those problems.

food isn't. You don't seriously think that I'm arguing that subsidizing these restaurants is going to change anything for the poor, right? Oh, I see, you're just being condescending. But doing a lot of this may make a budget difference -- they don't need to be driving BMWs at taxpayer expense (a cheaper car is just fine) and they don't need to be eating at taxpayer expense. I actually don't mind the cost of a REASONABLE car lease (anything luxury, the legislator should pay the difference in cost) -- they likely have to have cars in DC and at home, so that becomes an unusual expense. I do mind fucking feeding them. You're comparing apples and oranges. They have to eat no matter what job they have -- they don't have to have secret service protection no matter what job they have (and most legislators don't have it anyway).

All states have to apply to the national school lunch program, but it is a federally funded program that is separate and distinct from what you're describing in TX. The feds still reimburse from about $.23 to $2.4 per day for school lunches. How much the schools get depends on the financial needs of their students. The funding has been cut though -- among other things (until Reagan), the feds paid the salaries and benefits of cafeteria workers -- that changed in the 1980s. They also paid for equipment upkeep -- that also went out the window. There have been repeated cutbacks that impact school lunch programs and the communities that must try to make up for the shortfall. The program started in the 1940's to equalize that basic among students -- all would have enough to eat, at least while they were at school. It's now been dumped back into the laps of states and communities which, again, means that richer communities are more likely to get good food, or food at all if the Republicans get their way.

A lot of it is about perception. I personally don't think it's okay to be subsidizing fat cats while more and more American children are starving. That's my bottom line. I don't give a shit about their perks -- they have more perks than one can imagine (free lots of stuff, excellent health care, etc etc) -- I don't need to add their lunches to the mix.

you however are a bit grouchy, I gather. Eat something, perhaps a senator or representative. Solve two problems at once. ;)

Perk or not, if that's what they signed up for when they were elected, that's what they get.

The point of compensation is that it is a contractual trade for your time and expertise, deserved or not. So whether we like someone else's perks or not is totally and completely irrelevant to them having those perks as part of their package, whether they work for a private corporate or the government. It's a job, not a halo-polishing contest. However, the one job where we can decide who gets to suffer all those wonderful benefits is the electorate, and while we can vote for someone more fitting to receive those perks we can't vote for them to not have those perks.

I am certainly for sensible approaches. Will never "hate the rich" OR "eat the poor". Isn't there a middle ground here? Nobody is saying that the legislature is superior to us; any more than I would say that an attorney or doctor is superior to me (well, and also because I'm a HUGE egalitarian snob :P), but if we identify a PROBLEM with hunger, then we should work on the problem OF hunger. Making doctors and lawyers and the utterly wicked earn less :shrug: is not realistic and we would end up with even fewer doctors. We can probably do with fewer lawyers though. Hmmmm! :think: You may be on to something.

To that end the solutions to precollege nutritional programs really should be managed at the state level FIRST if that's supposed to be a priority. School lunch subsidies for equipment, food and salary do need to be bolstered by fed money as well, but Texas sucks because if there is anything we can push off as "not my problem" or else privatize to keep them poor people from Robin Hooding our gated comunities, we will stop at nothing to KEEP kids from being fed and educated while we try to avoid a state income tax, and simultaneously claim states rights (right to discriminate) against people based on who they choose to spend their lives with.

We need to overhaul the system that manages and controls the problems you brought up, not what the senate is eating for lunch. That's my two tarnished pennies.

and shoveling them into poorer, sub-standard school districts. We are having to increase class sizes and cut programs because we are getting robbed every year. But we still prevail and remain one of the best school districts in the nation :)

And to think the legislature has the nerve to chastise our community for wanting to raise a $100 million private endowment to subsidize programs that we lose because of the state's inability to properly fund schools.

Ok, enough of my off-topic rant :D

Just because you want to see Mitch McConnell super-size himself into a heart attack is no reason to take it out on all the staffers. I agree with post #3.

...of all things "Washington". FUCK the goddamn cafeteria and get started on (pick your favorite) the war, health care, education, TRUE tax reform, election reform, and I don't have the rest of the day to keep typing out EVERYTHING that needs fixin'. Bottom line, close all the congressional cafeterias for all I care and try "working w/o a lunch" like many a working American does. Now I truly feel "enlightened".

Fuck 'em, let 'em eat McDonalds.

why not just run the cafe better?

besides that mentioned in the article of losing jobs and the next generation of workers getting paid less.

They end up working under a what is essentially a slave driver (who may or may not be the actual owner), who does everything in their power to prevent 'pursuit of happiness' during work hours, and if we're to believe some of the news items posted on DU over the years, during off hours as well. In short, most privatized businesses are run by liars, cheats and thieves (this was my experience of some years), and they project those qualities onto their workers (customers too, but for that target their contempt is much more subtle), making employees lives a living hell. Then the employees are told to "smile" and "be happy". That's liars' training. Working under someone who creates employee misery but the employees are to pretend they're happy.

They need to start sharing the plebian experience and maybe they'll get a grip on what life is really like now that they've turned over everything to a bunch of crooks, liars, and thugs (the bush** admin).

I've been to both. You didn't know I was a big-time lobbyist, did you? :P

The House side is set up like a mall food court, only much better. I have always scored at the Regional American booth off to the right. Once it was Cajun! The Midwest one, featuring broiled trout, also ruled.

Plus, every now and then, an actual member will drop in. You can tell because (now that Cynthia McKinney's out :-) ) they all wear special pins that they use to get past security, into the special welevators, and so on.

Sounds like planned failure.

The last thing we need is for them to deal with trivial matters, such as, say, the environment. :sarcasm:

:shrug:

Screw 'em. Let them eat fish heads, for all I care. :grr:

he doesn't "mince" words ;0

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1ba_1213125506

Trust them to take over and run the oil companies or fix global warming ?

The proof is in the pudding ;)

And Democrats in the Senate and the others hand it to them on a silver platter.

But Universal Healthcare is not a British Style system it means universal access not government run hospitals. Nobody really wants that.

Kind of reminds me of people who criticized Hillary saying how can she run the country she can't run her own campaign....

Kinda true and very scary.

While I hate idea, I will say that at least Aramark offers an insurance program for employees that work a minimum of 30 hours per week.

EDIT ADD: I got no love for Aramark. But in all my years working in food service, their health bennies were the first I was ever offered. I never took them up on it so I have no idea if they followed through on the benefits.