T HE F LAT H AT
Vol. 112, Iss. 11 | Tuesday, November 8, 2022
SODEXO
Dining workers win union with Sodexo
The Weekly Student Newspaper
of The College of William and Mary
flathatnews.com | @theflathat
iGEM COMPETITION TEAM
Union aims to secure contract with better wages, benefits
MOLLY PARKS FLAT HAT MANAGING EDITOR
Oct. 24, Sodexo dining workers at the College of William and Mary announced they won their union with Sodexo. Now a recognized union, the Sodexo workers will begin contract negotiations in hopes of securing higher wages, affordable health insurance, pensions and better hours and working conditions. The dining services staff publicized their plans to unionize in September, but have been organizing underground with the help of the labor union UNITE HERE! since January. Sarah Zidlicky ’24 has worked at The Daily Grind and Commons Dining Hall on campus and has been part of the organization effort since April 2022. “What you have to do to get a union going is sign people up,” Zidlicky said. “So you get a majority of workers signed up, and then as soon as you have 50% plus one you can win a union. So that was, for starters, getting everything recognized was just getting people signed up. Which I mean, we reached a majority in two days, which was pretty unprecedented.” The students of the College showed up to support the workers, rallying on the Sadler Center terrace on Sept. 21 and calling for Sodexo to “respect our campus” and “respect our dining workers.” Zidlicky commended the extensive support from students and workers in helping underscore the importance of the union when it came time to be recognized by Sodexo. They noted that the success of the union led to an agreement of neutrality — meaning Sodexo agreed not to oppose the organization's efforts. “The showing up and showing out that students and workers did, it gave us so much power,” Zidlicky said. The College’s Sodexo workers are part of a larger national trend of worker organization in 2022. As of Sept. 30, the National Labor Relations Board has seen 2,510 union representation petitions filed in Fiscal Year 2022 — this is an increase of 53% from 1,638 petitions in Fiscal Year 2021. The 2022 unionization wave has tapped household names like Starbucks, Amazon and Trader Joe’s, but has also had a significant impact on Sodexo workers across the United States. Melanie Edwards, a late-night supervisor for Sodexo and a dining employee at the College for over 20 years, felt this cross-community unionization as she worked with UNITE HERE! and spread the word about their campaign. "We represent the company. We're doing the heavy load of the company. So they have to respect us at some point. And I think people are just getting fed up with it.” “I realized, like, okay, it's not just happening here in Williamsburg,” Edwards said. “It's happening all over. So I think companies, they get away with a lot and they're not respecting their workers. And they've got to realize that workers are part of the company. You know, we represent the company. We're doing the heavy load of the company. So they have to respect us at some point. And I think people are just getting fed up with it.” Sodexo is a food services and facilities management company that currently works in 55 countries and was founded in the 1960s in France. “Sodexo respects the right of our employees to choose to be represented by the union, proven by the hundreds of CBA’s we have in good standing with unions across the country — including with Unite Here. We have reached an agreement with Unite Here to recognize it as the employee’s representative,” a representative of Sodexo U.S. wrote to The Flat Hat. Within the past couple months, multiple subsects of Sodexo workers have gone public with plans to unionize — including dining staff at Loyola University New Orleans and cafeteria workers at Google in Atlanta. Other existing Sodexo unions — like Lufthansa Lounge workers at Newark Liberty International Airport and House of Representatives Food Service workers in Washington D.C. — are picketing for new contracts and better wages. Kevin Hollins has worked as a catering driver for Sodexo at Howard University since 2012 and is a shop steward for the UNITE HERE! Local Union 23 of Sodexo workers at Howard. Hollins has been traveling down to Williamsburg from D.C. for the past year to help Sodexo workers at the College organize. “I played a role as an organizer as well as a face that they can look to as a Sodexo worker,” Hollins said. “I basically went and knocked on people's doors and talked to the workers that we couldn't catch at work. Myself and a group of other people, you know, we all went out as a team and we talked to workers and we told them our stories because I think stories are very important when you're organizing new shops, especially people who've never been organized.” SEE UNION PAGE 8
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WINS GOLD IN PARIS
COURTESY PHOTO / THE IGEM FOUNDATION
College iGEM team takes home best Software and AI Development track AAFREEN ALI // THE FLAT HAT
Oct. 26-28, the College of William and Mary’s International Genetically Engineered Machine team won best in the Software and AI development track at the 2022 Grand Jamboree held in Paris. Competing against around 150 other teams, the College’s iGEM team also scored a gold medal, as well as nominations for Best Mathematical Model and Best Presentation. iGEM is a global organization focused on fostering research in synthetic biology, or bioengineering to create new biological systems. Research culminates annually at the Grand Jamboree for researchers at high school, undergraduate and graduate levels. This year, the College’s group was captained by biology majors Avery Bradley ’23 and Alana Thomas ’24. Faculty advisor and Chancellor Professor of Biology Margaret Saha and student advisor Beteel Abu-Ageel ’22 also supported the team in Paris. This year’s team included Lin Fang ’24, Megan Fleeharty ’24, Walker Knapp ’25, Zhe Liu ’24, Krithika Layagala ’25, Diego Morandi ’24, Bjorn Shockey ’23 and Debby Zhong ’25. The 2022 team chose to tackle the issue of fieldability, or a circuit’s ability to produce results in a natural environment. Their goal was to help researchers select an ideal chassis, or organism (usually bacteria) to house the circuit. They also hoped to further expand the applicability of synthetic biology beyond laboratory settings. “Let's say you're a researcher and you built some system to bioremediate pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay,” Bradley said. “You can input specific kinds of parameters about the Chesapeake Bay into our program, and it will say ‘okay, you should use P. putida as your chassis,’ as a way to help researchers easily figure out the optimal chassis. Because ultimately, if the chassis can't survive in that environment, your system isn't going to work. It's not going to produce any protein … it's useless.” The team began brainstorming for their competition concept in February 2022. “We had our general theme of fieldability throughout the year, but we progressively tried to narrow down the scope,” Knapp said. “So we started with reviewing different areas in there … then, we shifted focus to modeling behavior of bacteria once you put them in the environment. And finally, we narrowed down … So it was this iterative process of narrowing down the scope of the project to focus on the core of a problem we could solve.” Starting in late May and working throughout the summer, the team began research in both wetlab, or hands-on, experimental science, and drylab, or coding and math model-based, settings. In Bradley's eyes, the dedicated research time lent the
team a distinct focus. “It's fun because it's a unique opportunity to really immerse yourself in the research that you don't really get during the school year when you're having to worry about classes and everything,” Bradley said. “I also really liked the team dynamic of iGEM. I think it's different than other research labs because it was all of us constantly working together over the summer, collaborating and everything.” The experimental phase continued throughout the beginning of the 2022 fall semester. The drylab team, composed of Knapp, Shockey and Liu, worked on data analysis and refining the software. “We were mostly trying to analyze large amounts of metagenomic data for different bacteria cultures,” Knapp said. “What that data actually is is it's people that have gone out and have taken samples from the environment … [they] get a full readout of the different types of bacteria and what ratios are present in that sample. So we take in all of that data on the order of 200,000 – 300,000 of those samples from different sources, databases, individual studies that we analyze, and we try to collect all of those together and sort of merge the different parameters. … and we try to all unify that so that we can be put into the rest of the software.” The wetlab team worked concurrently on collecting samples to verify the software’s accuracy. “We actually went out to the college woods, and we dug up some soil, and then we did a bunch of wetlab stuff on it to get the relative abundance of bacteria in the soil,” Fang said. “This way we can test our software, because if we put the same environmental parameters into our software, ideally, what’s spit out by the software should be the same as the sequencing result we obtained from the lab outside.” Reaching out to professionals in the field of synthetic biology, the iGEM team supplemented the spaces in their research with expertise from other researchers. “We ran into a little bit of difficulty with a few knowledge gaps that showed up on the math team,” Knapp said. “We have a wide diversity of majors and areas of expertise, but there were only three of us on the math team so we really, we couldn't do everything and especially a lot of statistics topics and modeling topics. … But ultimately, we reached out to different experts in the field, different professors here, and we tried our best to reach … beyond the three of us to fill all those different gaps.” In addition to completing their project, the College’s iGEM team went above and beyond, creating outreach materials that earned them a gold medal. “We had one member of the team design a game called ReTerraforming Earth based on Terraforming Mars,” Saha said. “We took it to high schools, and they played the game and loved it and wanted copies of it … And we worked with the School of Ed, and we had high school students here
as well, doing outreach. So we do not just science, it's so much: it's collaboration, it's multidisciplinary, it's outreach, teaching the next generation about this incredibly cool field called syn bio.” Fang, Knapp and Bradley echoed Saha’s sentiments regarding the interdisciplinary nature of iGEM. For Knapp, the interdisciplinary approach was especially evident in the specifics of the project. “We had to bring in a bunch of different people with advanced biology knowledge to inform the purpose of the project. … and then from that point, we had to work with different predictive models to generate all this data, so that's where the computer scientists came in,” Knapp said. “Our math experts or physics people figure out the ways we can plug all this information into the computer and how to spit out useful information. From that point, we have people who are good at graphic design and communication to go and present this data in a cohesive manner that can be used by other people in the field. So it was really crucial for this project especially to have that wide range of different skill sets on the team.” Most of the team flew out to Paris to present at the competition, which was structured, as Bradley put it, like a large-scale science fair, complete with booths for each group. Groups would give a larger talk, then a more private talk for the judges. For some, it was their first time presenting at such a large-scale event, but the supportive team dynamic and general environment reduced some of that stress. “Fundamentally, it is a competition, but you don't feel that tense competitive feel when you say, play a soccer game,” Fang said. “Teams are really willing to share their projects and we communicate a lot. And I feel like it was a really welcoming environment and a great learning experience. Because we learned so much from other teams: their design process, their wet lab, and their software techniques.” For Fang, synthetic biology is inherently an ideal field for international collaboration. “Even if you're in, say, India, and you speak a completely different language, and that you're in a different timezone, we all do synthetic biology in the standard way,” Fang said. “We can communicate and improve each other because of this uniform language of synthetic biology. This is why iGEM is so important and international, because of this modularity. That's why we're able to get insights and provide insights to different teams across the globe.” Unified by this common language, Bradley and the team were inspired by the projects presented and look forward to the next Grand Jamboree and beyond.<“It was really powerful seeing what everybody did,” Bradley said. “iGEM is really big on solving global problems, and so it's all these projects that are all solving global problems altogether being done by people my age. It was really fascinating, it really feels like the future of science.”
COURTESY GRAPHIC / ALANA THOMAS
The College's iGEM team competed with a presentation including graphic designs to represent their identification of an optimal chassis for various microbiome environments.
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