By Taylor Dobbs, News Staff

After almost a month of public activism, during which students and faculty held a speak-out rally as a venue for workers to voice their issues with Chartwells management, union officials announced Northeastern’s Chartwells workers voted overwhelmingly last Thursday April 12 to join the UNITE HERE Local 26 union.

Workers voted 299-44 in favor of the union.

A crowd of workers and students marched around campus chanting “We are the union, the mighty mighty union,” after results came out.

They stood outside International Village (INV), chanting and cheering as they looked in on their colleagues, many of whom were wearing white pins in support of unionizing.

Johanny Santana, who has been a Chartwells employee at INV for over three years, said community support was a driving force in the process.

“The last couple of weeks were kind of tense, people were kind of nervous – ‘are we going to do this?’ – and that’s where the support came from the students, staff, the organizers, all of us getting together,” she said.

After months of behind-the-scenes planning, during which students and workers visited other employees at their homes to gather support, a group of workers and students rallied March 14. The group marched to Northeastern’s administrative offices on Columbus Avenue, where they delivered a petition signed by 293 of the workers to Vice President for External Affairs Michael Armini. The petition stated some of the grievances the workers had as well as their intention to unionize.

Workers said Chartwells managers psychologically abused them, sometimes yelling at them and called them names in front of coworkers and customers. One employee said he had a heart attack while working at Stetson East, but his manager refused to call an ambulance.

Chartwells failed to respond to multiple requests for comment about the allegations since last month.

In the month that followed the March 14 rally, an increasing number of employees came to work wearing pins showing their support for the effort to unionize. A section of the INV dining hall was converted April 12 to a polling station for the union vote.

As part of the UNITE HERE Local 26 union, Northeastern’s cafeteria staff join about 6,000 Boston workers, including hotel and cafeteria employees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Brandeis University.