Paul Williams has been working for Sodexo for more than nine years. He currently works at the Ohio State University stadiums preparing food, stocking, and receiving shipments.

Paul is good at his job and he enjoys it. He's been preparing food his whole life, since he grew up working in his dad's restaurant. When business dried up and his family was forced to close the restaurant, Paul worked various jobs in food service before being coming to Sodexo in 2001.

Yet despite his hard work and loyalty, Paul has no health insurance and he barely makes enough to survive. He works a second job in order to support his ailing mother and his surviving son. Both of Paul's sons had leukemia. One passed away several years ago, and the other lives an hour north of Paul in Marion, Ohio. Because the chemo keeps him too sick to work, Paul sends him money whenever he can.

"Every time I get paid I have to choose between paying a bill and buying food... or having some money at the end of the week to give to my mom or my son," Paul says.
Faced with that decision, Paul often chooses to go hungry--a harsh sentence for a man who spends his days preparing food for fans at OSU's stadiums.

Until recently, Sodexo's OSU operations threw out leftover food every week. "We used to have to watch them throw away all this food we could have taken home," Paul says, "I could have frozen it and lived off it for weeks."

Now Sodexo donates all of its leftover food to area soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Employees still aren't allowed take leftovers home, but Paul says that seeing it go to the homeless is easier than seeing it wasted.

Paul has joined his coworkers in trying to form a union not only to win fair pay and benefits, but because he takes pride in the food he prepares and wants to hold Sodexo to the same high standards.

Even though he's not supposed to touch the leftovers, Paul makes a point of visually inspecting the food that has been set aside for the shelters as
 best he can.

"I always tell people, 'Don't serve what you wouldn't eat'," Paul says, "I don't want them donating rotten food. I might be eating at one of these soup kitchens myself one day."