Last spring, unionized food service workers at the three major sports stadiums in South Philadelphia finally agreed on the terms of a new contract after multiple years of fraught negotiations. Partly because of the scale of this conflict, which involved more than 2,000 workers who have been part of Unite Here Local 247 since 2007, this struggle for a contract has become well known across the Philadelphia area. There had been three strikes across more than two years of negotiations before the union and its employer finally agreed to a deal — a fight which began practically as soon as I arrived at Swarthmore and started learning about Philadelphia politics. Stories of strikes, failed or disingenuous negotiations, and renewed attempts to reach an agreement have strongly influenced my engagement with the Philadelphia labor scene. I suspect another reason why this drama was so high profile is because of the implications of stadium workers’ strikes for the city, which famously has one of the most committed and fanatical sports cultures of any city.
Recently, we’ve witnessed another public (and relatively embarrassing) saga involving Philadelphia sports. Mayor Cherelle Parker pushed a deal through the city council to build the new 76ers arena in Chinatown, against many residents’ objections, only to abruptly announce that Comcast had now agreed to a deal which would keep the team and new stadium in South Philly. While this development relieved many residents and activists based in Chinatown, it also revealed the impotence of the city government, which was unable to resist being pushed around and embarrassed by Philadelphia’s largest corporation. While the deeply intertwined and often uneven relationship between city government and massive corporations is certainly not new, it does seem to only be accelerating in recent years and perhaps taking on a somewhat new dimension, especially in the case of the Philadelphia stadium workers.
During their fight for a new contract, Local 247 was not negotiating directly with the city of Philadelphia, which owns Lincoln Financial Field and Citizens Bank Park. Rather, as with the vast majority of publicly owned stadiums, the city has contracted out much of the work needed to keep the stadium running to private companies. In Philadelphia’s case, that role falls to Aramark, a private food service provider that, based on annual revenue, is the second-largest corporation headquartered in the city, behind Comcast. Aramark, founded nearly a hundred years ago, has dramatically expanded its scope across the United States in the past few decades, primarily by buying out or otherwise acquiring smaller competitors in an attempt to dominate the market. Nonetheless, or perhaps all the more importantly, it is essential to critically examine how this corporation, and its quite dubious practices, have been affecting not only the private market and the consumers and workers whom it directly interacts with, but also the public sphere with which companies like Aramark in particular have become increasingly intertwined.
If you decide to briefly peruse the internet in an attempt to learn about the effects of outsourcing to companies such as Aramark you’ll find many econ and tech blogs, as well as important economists and businessmen themselves, who gleefully proclaim its many benefits. A recent article entitled “Outsourcing is Booming,” whose low score on GPTZero AI checker is somehow even more concerning than if it had been fully AI-generated, lists the benefits of outsourcing, which include “cost saving,” “access to expertise,” and “efficiency gains.” What this and many other pieces like it fail to consider are the severely problematic effects that such a drive for efficiency and productivity has on a company’s workers and, to some degree, its customers. Aramark has faced intense criticism for its treatment of workers, draconian surveillance tactics, lawsuits alleging inadequate food for prisoners, and student complaints about poor-quality campus dining. However, what is also at stake with this particular form of ruthless profit seeking is perhaps something relevant to the more philosophical distinction between the public and private spheres.
A central issue with the kind of contracting work in which corporations like Aramark engage is that the companies or institutions that employ them are able to absolve themselves of much responsibility for problems that inevitably arise, which, in this case, are far too common. Famously, Nike’s initial defense when being exposed for using child labor in 1996 was that they should not be held responsible (legally or morally) because this work, done in Pakistan, had been outsourced to subcontractors over whom they had little control. The chain of accountability gets murky when institutions are not directly in charge of their workers; who knows what exactly is going on, how they are being treated? It is more difficult to intervene if severe issues do arise. One can clearly see how massive problems of accountability and exploitation might easily emerge from the very model of outside contracting. While the effects of this kind of outsourcing are evidently disturbing when they are exclusively relegated to the private sphere, as with the Nike example, there becomes a different and perhaps even more sinister problem when companies like Aramark are employed by public institutions. This is because the underlying purpose of the government is, at least ostensibly, to serve the people and to uphold the common good.
Milton Friedman callously argued that the social responsibility of corporations is simply to improve their profits — this is their stated goal toward which their internal decision-making process and commitment to shareholders is geared. Friedman’s is certainly a contestable claim, but, on some level, it articulates the logic of the market quite plainly. Why should we expect anything more from Aramark than a commitment to their bottom line? Social pressure can certainly influence company policy, but ultimately, when it comes to the largest and most successful corporations, any changes they make will still, ultimately, be in service of making a profit.
However, I think we should certainly expect more than that from institutions that are grounded in the service of something other than profit — in particular, those whose ultimate goal is aimed toward the common good in one way or another. This is why the embrace of private contractors like Aramark as an intermediary between the state and the workers who staff its stadiums, prisons, and public universities is so problematic. We should hold them to a higher standard — to a higher level of accountability, if only because their very mission and motivations, at their core, are fundamentally different from that of a purely self-interested company.
The state, though, is not the only institution whose employment of outside contractors is something we should be wary of in this way. In fact, this issue feels extremely relevant to our own community at Swarthmore. Last semester, The Phoenix published an editorial arguing that the college’s administration should “prove it’s worthy” of the endowment tax exemption it fortuitously received tax in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Since Swarthmore is no longer contributing to the public through taxes, the college has an imperative to help benefit its community in other ways. Even without this imperative, central to Swarthmore’s mission as a college is a commitment to social responsibility and to the common good (at least to some degree).
I would argue that all colleges have a certain social obligation similar to that of Swarthmore. We don’t want these institutions to be run like companies, and we should expect them to be accountable in a more robust way than companies ever can be. Private colleges and universities across the country often do outsource many of their workers, giving these institutions less direct control over their workers. These workers are, in turn, left more at the mercy of private companies like Aramark, for whom profit is the primary, if not exclusive, end.
This is certainly not to say that, without outsourcing, there can be no issues. In fact, this is far from the case. However, if we want institutions of education to live up to their social responsibility, they should at least be directly accountable for how their workers are treated. We should be happy that Swarthmore’s dining and janitorial services are, for the most part, not contracted out to for-profit companies. However, given the extent to which other colleges have embraced outsourcing and given Swarthmore’s recent commitment to operating budget cuts in service of “long-term fiscal sustainability,” we should be aware of the possibility that this may change. And, if it does, this change will not be for the better.
