Contract plight threatens ferry food service

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, December 25, 2003

Ever grab a hamburger and a Coke on a ferry?

You won’t after Jan. 1, if the state ferry system, a concessionaire and a union don’t work out their differences in coming days.

Effective Dec. 31, Sodexho USA will walk away from its contract to provide food service on the ferry system, including the Mukilteo to Clinton and the Edmonds to Kingston runs.

Washington State Ferries is looking for a new food vendor, but the earliest it could get one in place and have food service start again is April 1.

Still, there may be a deal in the works that allows Sodexho to continue service on a temporary basis until a new concessionaire is selected, said Dennis Conklin, the business agent for Inlandboatmen’s Union. The union represents 148 people who cook the ferry food.

"I’m confident we’ll be open," Conklin said, saying that 84 of the 107 union members who voted Tuesday said they want to sign an agreement to work for Sodexho until Aug. 31.

Sodexho spokeswoman Leslie Aun declined to say whether the company has a deal with the union workers.

Ferries spokeswoman Patricia Patterson said the news is encouraging.

"All we have is reports that a new contract has been worked out between Sodexho and the union," Patterson said. "We don’t know what the terms are, and we don’t know if they’re going to work."

The brouhaha started last February, when Sodexho approached the ferry system with a request to end its contract because the number of riders had fallen, the economy was slow and the cost of labor had gone up.

The three parties worked out a deal to have Sodexho continue service until the end of the year, giving the ferry system time to find a new vendor.

The trouble started when the ferry system in September put out a request for a proposal that asked for 50 percent of the concessionaire’s revenue and ended the practice of making the concessionaire hire employees from Inlandboatmen’s Union.

Accustomed to having to pay only about 10 percent of its revenues to the ferry system, no vendor submitted a proposal. At the same time, the union appealed the decision to not link its members to a new contract, an appeal the union won in December.

Although it’s appealing the decision to link the union to the new contract, the ferry system will honor the requirement for now, Patterson said. The link to the union is included in the request for proposals that is out now and due in February.

The new proposal doesn’t require paying a set amount to the ferry system, but Patterson said the state agency is unwilling to allow an operator to pay nothing, saying that the agency needs to at least cover the cost of dealing with the concessionaires.

Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.