Emily Messa House Protest 6 6 09 pt1

On Saturday morning June 6, 2009 the University of Houston Students for Fair Trade (SFT) (http://uhfairtrade.org/) did a house protest at Emily Messa's house in Clear Lake, TX which is a suburb of Houston. Messa is the Assistant Vice President for University Services, but another title she goes under is the asst. VP for finance and administration. This means she facilitates all the contracts at the university.

Students for Fair Trade has been active since February 2006 on our campus. We have had a lot of wins on fair trade coffee. Recently we've asked them to make our campus an all fair trade campus. Our other request is that they pay the Aramark food service workers on our campus $10 to $11 an hour to come in line with the City of Houston contract with its 13,000 employees.
http://www.afscme.org/publications/17984.cfm

Unfortunately, Ms. Messa who makes about $100,000 a year, does not like to actually listen to serious student concerns. So we gathered some of our allies like the People's Party III, and took to the streets outside her house.

The Aramark / U of H contract is up next summer so it's time for us to organize to get the ethical contracting provision of a living wage inserted before they renew this contract of give it to another food service provider.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• UH SFT
• Emily Messa
• University of Houston
• Aramark
• living wage
• ethical contracting
• food service workers
• HOPE
• SEIU
• AFSCME

[za7ch]

Good stuff.