Serving two million customers each day, Guckenheimer Enterprises is the largest private, domestic food service company in the nation.  From Redwood Shores, they contract-out cooks, waitresses, and busers to provide work place dining at many of Silicon Valley’s major corporate campuses.  They are fiercely anti-union.  And according to their website, their managers receive training for four weeks at "W.I.T. University (Whatever It Takes Univeristy), where the brightest and best recruits are equipped with the ingredients for success at Guckenheimer."

Tapping the star power of activist actor Danny Glover, a service workers’ union said Monday that it was stepping up its campaign to organize cafeteria employees in Silicon Valley, promising protests at companies that use a contractor that has resisted unionization efforts.

“These companies make enormous profits,'’ Glover said before a labor rally at Antioch Baptist Church in San Jose. While the companies pay their own workers good wages and benefits, “they have to bear witness to the fact that the men and women who serve them, who work for the agency they contract with to serve them, are given less than enough to live on.'’

The union, Unite Here, has been trying to organize employees at Redwood Shores-based Guckenheimer Enterprises for about a year. In November, the union launched a campaign accusing the company of forcing workers into taxpayer-paid health care by offering low-wage workers company-sponsored plans at prices they can’t afford.

The union is asking more than 50 Silicon Valley employers who contract with Guckenheimer to sign a “code of conduct'’ that would request its contractors to provide affordable health care and allow union organizing efforts without management interference. The union plans to hold its first rally targeting an employer at Broadcom’s San Jose campus Feb. 28.

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