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Embattled Kosher Food Factory Faces Growing Retail Consensus on Workers' Rights Abuses

New York, NY- Morton Williams, a well-known chain of twelve supermarkets, has discontinued the sale of Sonny & Joe's hummus over concerns about workers' rights violations at Flaum Appetizing Corp., the Brooklyn-based producer and owner of the Sonny & Joe's brand.  Morton Williams joins a critical mass of prominent retailers including Fairway, Zabar's, and Food Emporium that have dropped Sonny & Joe's hummus after immigrant workers began speaking out against pervasive wage theft, abusive management, and denial of benefits at Flaum.  Workers are waging an energetic campaign with the Focus on the Food Chain initiative to bring Flaum Appetizing and its owner Moishe Grunhut into compliance with the rule of law and to recover illegally withheld compensation.  45 supermarket and grocery store locations have pulled Sonny & Joe's hummus off the shelves amid the heated dispute over Flaum's lack of respect for immigrant workers.

New York, NY- Legendary First Amendment litigator Martin Garbus and noted workers' rights organization Brandworkers have taken on the representation of gourmet coffee workers being subjected to a controversial defamation lawsuit by prominent Brooklyn-based coffee company, Gorilla Coffee and its owners. After sustained attempts to improve what they viewed as a hostile work environment, the workers caused a stir in the gourmet coffee community and in the news media by resigning their employment at Gorilla Coffee as a group and discussing their decision in a letter to the New York Times. The Times, which published the letter online, and one of its reporters are also defendants in the suit which erroneously argues that the letter was defamatory. The letter is available online here.

"Retaliatory, anti-speech lawsuits like the one from Gorilla Coffee have the potential to both harm innocent people who choose to speak out and chill the speech of others who would like to make their voices heard," said Martin Garbus. "This lawsuit is without merit and will be defended vigorously until victory."

A well-known Park Slope institution, Gorilla Coffee was shuttered for over two weeks after essentially the entire staff resigned en masse last April. The workers took issue with what they viewed as the heavy-handed management style of operations director Carol McLaughlin and finally had enough when it became clear that company owner Darleen Scherer was unwilling to remedy the situation. In their letter to the Times, the workers cited their repeated attempts to create a tolerable work environment at Gorilla Coffee, attempts which ultimately proved unsuccessful. Instead, they were left to deal with a workplace that in their view represented a, "...perpetually malicious, hostile, and demeaning work environment that was not only unhealthy, but also, as our actions have clearly shown, unworkable."

Disclaimer - The opinions of the author do not necessarily match those of the IWW. The image pictured to the right did not appear in the original article, we have added it here to provide a visual perspective. This article is reposted in accordance to Fair Use guidelines.

By Izabela Rutkowski and Erin Durkin - New York Daily News, November 26th 2010

A Williamsburg kosher food company is locked in a battle with former workers who charge they were stiffed out of overtime pay - and then fired when they complained.

National Labor Relations Board investigators found that Flaum Appetizing Corp. illegally booted the workers, and ordered the company to cough up around $260,000 in back pay. But owner Moshe Grunhut has refused to comply - saying he won't pay the workers because they're undocumented immigrants.

The fired employees said they spent years working as much as 80 hours a week for minimum wage with no overtime, for bosses who often peppered them with verbal abuse.

"I worked 11 years for that company and I never received a dollar of overtime or one holiday or one sick day, nothing," said Gustino Romero, 32, of Bushwick. "I worked from 7 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. ... We always asked for [overtime], but they said no."

Maria Corona, 36, of Williamsburg, said frequent insults from her boss made the situation worse.

"The manager called us cockroaches, tarantulas, all kinds of offensive names," she said. "The truth is we were unfairly exploited."

When the workers tried to form a union and went on a brief strike in 2008, management ordered them off the Flaum premises - a move the National Labor Relations Board ruled was illegal retaliation.