| Handyfat Backwage Trial Begins Monday
By Stephanie Basile 
February 28, 2008
March 3, 2008 @ 9:30am
Federal Court Building
Cadman Plaza East, Brooklyn, NY
Handyfat Trading will go on trial this Monday in an NLRB case involving backwages for six former employees. The company is accused of failing to pay minimum wage and overtime to the workers, some of whom were with the company for as long as 10 years.
The six employees joined the IWW in 2005 out of frustration with poor working conditions. They were the first warehouse workers to join what would later become the IWW Food and Allied Workers Union, IU 460/640. In January 2007, they were fired for their union involvement.
The IWW has already won one case against Handyfat, in which the judge found the company guilty of illegaly terminating nine workers for union involvement and ordered reinstatement. In an unusual move, the NLRB appealed the decision, and the case is currently in front of the federal NLRB.
Anthony Emengo will be representing Handyfat. Emengo represented Handyfat in its previous trial, and also represented EZ-Supply in its trial against the IWW.
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Retail Workers Celebrate Million-Dollar Victory
By Matt Schwarzfeld, City Limits 
Photo by Gilberto Tadday
February 19, 2008
From City Limits:
Will the organizing model that won back wages and overtime for shop employees have staying power?
Frigid weather didn't stop employees of the Soho retail clothing store Yellow Rat Bastard from celebrating the $1.4 million in back wages they just won in a settlement by rallying outside the shop and marching up Broadway last week.
Months of organizing by the Retail Action Project (RAP) finally paid off with an announcement by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo last Monday that Henry Ishay – who owns Yellow Rat Bastard along with other trendy clothing stores in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn – would compensate for paying employees below the state minimum wage, failing to provide overtime, and illegally reducing hours and firing those who cooperated with the attorney general's investigation. In addition to the wage settlement, RAP – which brought workers together and offered training and support – also helped workers acquire layoff protection in three of Ishay’s stores and focus attention on what many workers have described as unhealthy, unsafe working conditions.
With this victory achieved for more than a thousand current and former workers, some wonder what's ahead for this group and others like it. Like most of New York City’s retail workers, employees at YRB and Ishay’s other stores are not unionized, and therefore not protected by a collective bargaining agreement. RAP is not a union, but rather a grassroots advocacy organization fighting alongside workers to protect their rights.
“With retail jobs, the pay is so low that workers often quit and go on to the next store rather than try to take on all these problems,” said RAP organizer Carrie Gleason. “Our goal is to make it easier for these workers to deal with problems, because they may encounter them all over again at the next store they go to.”
“I think this shows how incredibly hard it is for many workers to unionize, but how great the need is,” Gleason said. She points to other worker advocacy groups like Make the Road by Walking and Despierta Bushwick as models for how to make improvements for non-unionized, immigrant workers who are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Such groups "give workers the back-up they need on the job regardless of their collective bargaining status. At the same time, workers build networks and get experience in how to deal with problems collectively. It’s a stepping stone to unionizing.”
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, in fact, helped create RAP, along with the neighborhood advocacy group Good Old Lower East Side. Profiles on MySpace and Facebook – which were actually suggested by some of the workers, a youthful group overall – gave the effort a boost too, she noted.
Labor relations experts agree that this is a promising model, but question whether it’s replicable.
“These workers’ success shows that you can protect workers a number of ways,” said Ken Margolies, an organizing expert at the NYC extension of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “The question is whether this can be effective with companies bigger than local retailers, and with non-retailers. Would it work against Starbucks? I don’t know if enough pressure could be generated. Starbucks has a lot more resources to resist and do a counter-information campaign.”
Margolies thinks that collective bargaining is an essential, irreplaceable tool. “There’s only so many times you can do the pressure tactic before you wear people out or the other side learns how to beat it. The advantage of collective bargaining is that you get legal recognition, which means the employer has to bargain with you and you reduce your agreements to a legal and binding contract," he said. "So when the worker advocacy group stops watching, the employer can’t change his or her mind and and revert back.”
For many of the workers, the experience has been eye-opening. “When I first got involved with the Retail Action Project, I thought it was just Yellow Rat Bastard violating workers’ rights. But when I got a second job at another store in SoHo, I found out they were paying less than minimum wage too,” said Guatemalan native Loren Orellana, 24, an employee at the Ishay store Boys and Chicks.
“Working for YRB, I earned just $5.50 per hour ... and worked as many as 60 hours a week without overtime pay,” said Edwin Dyer, 25, who worked at Boys and Chicks for two years. “YRB thought they could get away with cheating us out of money. They thought we would never exercise our rights because so many of us are young and are immigrants," said Dyer, who is from Trinidad.
The lawsuit covered employees of the stores between Dec. 2000 and Dec. 2006, during which time the state minimum wage rose from $5.15 to $6 per hour on Jan. 1, 2005, and then to $6.75 on Jan. 1, 2006. (On Jan. 1 2007, it rose again to $7.15.)
Scott Fenstermaker, Ishay’s lawyer, described his client as happy with the settlement amount. “They were asking for significantly more money, and we were able to describe to them why a more reasonable settlement was in order. Much of what they were saying was untrue. A lot of them were basically taking advantage of the company in ways that brought their credibility into question,” Fenstermaker said. He was not clear on what role RAP played in the settlement.
RAP is currently helping guide workers through the AG’s claims process. Employees working at any of Ishay’s stores in the last six years will complete a notarized form, which the AG’s office will use to allocate the $1.4 million settlement.
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Endless Task: Keeping Unions Clean
By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times 
Former Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa and former Gambino boss John Gotti
February 12, 2008
From The New York Times:
For more than a decade, federal officials and court-appointed monitors have strained to clean up two New York-area unions, representing cement truck drivers and construction laborers, that prosecutors say were long under Mafia control.
Indeed, prosecutors once described the cement truck drivers’ union, Local 282 of the Teamsters, as a “candy store” for the mob that they say funneled $1.2 million a year to John Gotti, the longtime Gambino crime family boss who died in prison in 2002.
On Thursday, federal, state and local authorities announced one of the most expansive organized crime indictments in years, involving 87 defendants, including much of the leadership of the Gambino crime family. In the 170-page indictment, which was filled with nicknames like “Jackie the Nose” and “Fat Richie” and accusations of extortion and murder, was evidence that cleanup efforts of the Teamsters and the Laborers have fallen short.
The indictment charged that a trucking company owner, Joseph Spinnato, together with unnamed others, repeatedly embezzled money from Local 282’s health and pension funds. The charges detailed an enduring practice in which construction and trucking companies contribute less money to union benefit funds than is required, usually by underreporting the hours that employees work. While the scheme often operates with the complicity of union stewards, officials with Local 282 and its benefits funds were not accused of wrongdoing.
In a separate count, Louis Mosca, the business manager of Laborers’ Local 325 in Jersey City, was charged with taking a $2,000 bribe to give someone a union card, a move often done to help someone qualify for a construction job or union benefits. Michael King, a shop steward of Laborers’ Local 731 in Queens, was also accused of selling a membership.
Mr. Spinnato, Mr. Mosca and Mr. King have pleaded not guilty. Officials from Local 282 and the laborers’ union, which represents construction workers, brick haulers and asbestos removers, declined to comment.
Robert D. Luskin, a former federal organized crime prosecutor who is special counsel to the Laborers’ International Union of North America as part of a decade-long internal effort to root out corruption, said the labor racketeering charges were not surprising.
“The fact is the dollars involved in the construction industry are so great and the opportunities at so many levels for corruption are so broad that this is a problem that will never, ever go away,” he said.
Prosecutors say the unions that deliver cement and other building supplies have long been a magnet for Mafia involvement because mob officials know that if they delay deliveries, construction companies can lose large amounts of money. Those union locals thus become an ideal pressure point for extortion.
The Gambino crime family made Teamsters Local 282 a longtime fief, with three of the union’s presidents going to prison in the 1980s and 1990s for their links to organized crime.
In 1995, a judge approved a federal monitorship of Local 282, based in Lake Success, in Nassau County near the Queens border, after prosecutors realized that mob influence remained endemic.
Milton Mollen, a retired judge who helped run the monitoring program, said that more than 50 of Local 282’s officials and stewards were removed because of their links to organized crime.
“I’m a bit concerned about the indictment as far as Local 282 is concerned,” Mr. Mollen said. “We think it’s been pretty much cleaned up and run democratically. The indictments concerned the benefit funds, and unfortunately we did not have jurisdiction over the funds.”
Federal investigators said that the underpayments to Local 282’s benefits funds were at least $500,000 and possibly far more.
Gordon S. Heddell, the inspector general for the United States Labor Department, said the indictments did not allege any corruption involving officials at Local 282’s funds, but he said he might pursue a further investigation of those funds. “You have these health and pension funds where it’s easy for an organized crime family to embezzle and put pressure on union officials,” he said. “Those monitorships have been very effective, but we still have to deal with organized crime. Organized crime is like a cancer. Sometimes we treat it and beat it, but sometimes new forms emerge.”
The indictment also accused trucking company officials of falsifying records by ordering Local 282 drivers to work without submitting papers showing that they were doing a union job.
The indictment was awkward for Gary La Barbera, the president of the New York City Central Labor Council as well as president of Local 282. Mr. La Barbera, who has helped lead the cleanup of that local, declined to comment.
On Friday, Mr. Luskin and other union monitors suspended Mr. Mosca, and Local 325’s executive board agreed to emergency supervision.
Mr. Luskin said he would investigate further, adding that he would not be surprised if the corruption was broader than what was in the indictment.
He noted that Local 325 had been temporarily placed into trusteeship in 1999 because of financial irregularities and undemocratic practices.
“For as long as we’re around, we’re going to have to fight a ground war in New York and New Jersey,” Mr. Luskin said. “It’s like World War I. We take some ground and then we have to fight to take it back again.”
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has been under federal supervision since 1989, when a federal racketeering lawsuit named 27 Mafia leaders and all 18 of the union’s board members as defendants. The lawsuit asserted that the mob had controlled four Teamster presidents, including Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared in 1975.
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Taming Wild Edibles
By Diane Krauthamer 
February 03, 2008
Taming Wild Edibles
by Diane Krauthamer
Wouldn’t it be a real travesty to spend $50 on a wonderful lobster dinner at New York City’s highest rated restaurant, only to find out after your meal that the food was rotten?
Behind the scenes at New York City’s #1 rated restaurant
Of course, fine dining establishments must comply with health and safety standards in their kitchens. Of course, establishments ranked as NYC’s most popular wouldn’t dare serve rotten seafood. But there may not be any rotten seafood at all—this is only on the surface. Something happens well before the seafood even reaches the kitchen and it will make you even sicker.
It’s actually the company which supplies seafood to some of the city’s favorite restaurants that’s rotten; that systematically treats its workers rotten—they’re called Wild Edibles.
Wild Edibles supplies seafood to a range of locations throughout New York, including some of the highest-rated spots in Zagat’s guide, including a chain of restaurants operated by -famous NYC restauranteur Danny Meyers. With such high-profile customers, it wouldn’t seem that company CEO Richard Martin needs to cut costs, but in light of illegal labor practices he may need to start worrying about losing business.
The last step in the NYC food chain
Beginning shifts at 2 in the morning and continuing with physically demanding delivery and factory work into the early afternoon, workers at the Queens-based seafood company usually work more than 8 hours per day with few breaks and inadequate pay. While the conditions in themselves are hardly tolerable, continued discrimination and harassment have resulted in some people quitting and others getting fired.
Former employee Augustin Meza says that in his five years at the company, he witnessed and experienced consistent racial discrimination and eventually quit out of frustration. Meza said that Latino workers were denied rights and privileges that were granted to their white co-workers. Meza saw evidence of this in comparing timecards. He said that while Caucasian workers never worked more than 8 hours per day, Latino workers would work 10 or more hours without receiving overtime pay. Additionally, Latinos were generally made to work “half-time” on holidays because it would make the next day’s work “easier for everyone else.”
Latinos also faced higher scrutiny. They were made to pay for soft drinks when white workers received them for free, and management constantly watched them like hawks.
“(Martin) was always telling us ‘you have to do something’ and making us work. But when white people were outside smoking and laughing with each other, he didn’t say anything,” Meza said.
After years of working under these conditions, Meza made three attempts to speak directly with owner Richard Martin about his concerns, but was simply ignored.
Of course, Meza is not the only person who has had to deal with wretched conditions at Wild Edibles. His co-workers dealt with similar exploitative conditions, and after years of tolerating discriminatory practices, they united together and stood up to the bosses.
Organizing and union-busting
In mid-July 2007, New York City Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizers reached out to Wild Edibles truck drivers and warehouse workers to build organizing efforts. Within a little more than a month, workers were actively organizing with the union to demand an end to exploitative conditions.
One worker who immediately took on a leadership role in organizing, Raymundo Lara Molina, was fired after a month because of his involvement. According to IWW organizer Billy Randal, workers at the plant “felt someone had identified him as an active union supporter.”
Following this, workers became increasingly concerned about being targeted and picked out, but this did not hamper their efforts.
On August 20 at 2 AM, IWW supporters and members joined Wild Edibles workers and marched on the plant--demanding that Martin pay overtime, reinstate Molina, and cease further retaliation against Wild Edibles employees for union involvement.
During the action, Martin retaliated on the spot by firing another organizer, Jason Borges. According to public testimony, Martin called Borges into his office, asked him what he wanted, and when Borges replied that he wanted to be paid overtime and receive benefits, Martin refused and promptly fired him, yelling at Borges to “get the f--- out” as Borges left the premises.
On August 24, Raul Molina was also fired in retaliation. In the weeks following, Julio Cesar Moreno Gonzalez and Marco Antonio Corona were forced to leave due to the high pressure that they faced.
Taming Wild Edibles
In response to illegal discrimination, sixteen current and former Wild Edibles employees filed a Federal class action lawsuit against the company on September 17. According to the complaint, Wild Edibles violated New York Labor Law and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by not compensating workers 1 ˝ times the base wage for working more than 40 hours per week, and by discriminating and retaliating for protected activity.
Additionally, a temporary injunction was filed in order to protect workers from further intimidation and retaliation. Despite this order, two more workers, Jose Fernandez and Limo Martinez, were fired in late September.
As litigation continues, the six fired workers and their supporters continue to draw attention to the company’s illegal practices through the courts and beyond.
Just after the suit was filed in court, current and fired Wild Edibles workers, members of the IWW and supporters from the newly-formed workers’ rights organization Brandworkers International, held a press conference in front of one of Wild Edibles’ largest customer restaurants, an upscale French restaurant in the West Village called Pastis. In addition to announcing the lawsuit, workers alerted customers that Pastis was serving seafood processed under shameful conditions.
With the spotlight shined on Wild Edibles' unfair employment practices, Pastis owner Keith McNally agreed on October 4 to stop doing business with Wild Edibles. McNally’s other fine dining restaurants—Balthazar, Schiller’s, Morandi, Pravda, and Lucky Strike—have also discontinued business with the seafood company until the dispute is resolved. All in all, this created a significant dent in Wild Edibles’ business, causing them to lose approximately 10% of their revenue, or $1 million per year, according to court papers.
Meanwhile, current Wild Edibles workers are re-building union presence in the shop, with a “very strong sense of solidarity,” said Billy Randal. Because of the increased pressure from the IWW and Brandworkers International, demands are slowly being met as the campaign strengthens.
As litigation continues, workers are fighting together across the food supply chain in the hopes that current employees will live and work in humane conditions, that former employees will receive the compensation that is owed to them, and that justice, not rotten seafood, will be served.
(Stephanie Basile, Jonathan Harvey, Daniel Gross and Billy Randal contributed to this article)
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