A dozen students brought Wednesday's national “not-with-our-money” campaign to Xavier University, focusing on the company that provides their food services.

        In leaflets and skits, undergrads said Sodexho Marriott Services' anti-union efforts ignore Catholic social teachings.

        Students also attacked the firm's connection to the private prison industry.

        During lunch in the Cintas Center dining area, where most Sodexho Marriott employees labor at XU, activists appealed to classmates to join their cause.

        Diners barely paused to watch the skit, listen to the politicized version of the spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”or freshman Brian Loewe's brief, impassioned speech.

        Outside, another student stood in a makeshift cell to dramatize Sodexho Marriott's tie to prisons.

        Sodexho Marriott, which has about 100 employees in food service at the university, has been on campus under that corporate name since 1997. Leslie Aun, spokeswoman at corporate headquarters in Gathersburg, Md., said predecessor firms also served XU.

        Local 12 of the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees international union began organizing efforts at XU in October.

        Wednesday's protests were part of Local 12's long-range effort to build campus pressure on Sodexho to remain neutral when employees decide whether to join a union.

        If that approach fails, Mr. Loewe and union organizer Ryan Nissim-Sabat said, they and their colleagues will ask XU to choose a food service whose policies more closely reflect those of the Catholic Church.

        Ms. Aun said Sodexho Marriott “prefers not to have unions” but if the time comes, it would welcome an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

        She said Sodexho Marriott has contracts at about 5,000 colleges, hospitals, hotels and other institutions, of which at least 240 have union contracts. They include the University of Cincinnati cafeteria and some major Cincinnati hotels.

        Ms. Aun said the students were mistaken when they complained that their meal money supported private prisons.

        She blamed this on a misunderstanding: Sodexho Alliance, a multinational based in Paris, France, owns 48 percent of Sodexho Marriott and 5 percent of Corrections Corporation of America, which runs private prisons.

        “We respect the students for caring about things ... for making the world a better place,” Ms. Aun said. “We just don't think we should be the place to complain to. They are tackling the wrong company.”

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