The cash registers have gone quiet, the stoves have been turned off and the are coolers are unplugged.
Food service on all Puget Sound ferries stopped with the last ferry run Wednesday evening, indefinitely putting 140 food workers out of work and ending a decades-old tradition of serving hot food on the 500 daily ferry runs that crisscross the Sound.
All parties involved — Washington State Ferries, a concessionaire and a union — said they regret that they couldn’t work out a deal to keep the kitchens going. Each said they were not being compensated enough, and each said it offered concessions that should have resulted in a deal. But in the end, it apparently wasn’t enough.
Now, there will not be food service on any Puget Sound-area ferry until the end of March at the earliest.
"Until last night, we were really hopeful that we were going to be able to work something out," Leslie Aun, a spokeswoman for Sodexho USA, said on Wednesday.
Instead, the international food services company spent New Year’s Eve removing its equipment from the galleys of the state’s ferries. The equipment that will be sent to some of the other 10,000 locations where Sodexho provides food service.
"It’s a very sad day," Aun said, adding that the company regrets that it had to lay off its entire ferry workforce. "It’s not a very happy New Year’s."
The Inlandboatmen’s Union, which represents the laid-off workers, placed the blame for the shutdown squarely on the ferry system. Dennis Conklin, the union’s business agent, said the union and concessionaire were able to work well together.
"They want their jobs back," Conklin said of the workers. "They’ll go on unemployment. They’re going to have to try to find (temporary) work."
Still, the workers will eventually get their jobs back, because the union recently won a legal battle that ensures that a new concessionaire must first go to the union to hire a workforce. The state is appealing that decision but has agreed to honor the ruling.
"They’re all going to have to come sit down with us and talk," Conklin said.
For their part, ferry system officials said they were being asked to subsidize the food service company, which the state is not willing to do.
"We didn’t want it to come to this," said Patricia Patterson, a ferry system spokeswoman. "We feel terrible about it."
Still, she said Sodexho and the union were asking that the ferry system be paid only 4 percent of Sodexho’s revenues, which Patterson said would not cover the ferry system’s costs for hosting the food service company.
Until August, the state received 10.5 percent of Sodexho’s revenue.
Claiming it couldn’t afford to pay that much, Sodexho threatened to walk away from its contract at that time. Instead, a temporary rate of 7 percent was worked out while the state worked on getting a new ferry contract. That temporary contract expired on New Year’s Eve without a new contract in place, mainly because no concessionaire submitted a proposal to the state.
Now the ferry system is trying again to get a concessionaire in place. The hope is to have a new vender in place by the end of March or early April, which means there will be no food service until then.
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.
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