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Immigrant workers win severance pay from Hain Celestial corporation
On Tuesday, April 4, supporters of the embattled Ethnic Gourmet workforce began informational pickets at local Trader Joe's and Whole Foods markets. [Later that day a delegation of the workers met with attorneys for Hain Celestial at Greater Boston Legal Services as supporters picketed outside. The workers won their demand for severance pay. We will publish more details in our May edition—The Bridge staff.]
As supporters picketed outside the Ethnic Gourmet factory in Framingham March 31, seventy workers began a work stoppage to demand a fair severance package and end to intimidation.
Management retaliated by "permanently replacing" the workers. They are all immigrants, from Central America, Brazil and Asia. Some have worked at Ethnic Gourmet for as long as eleven years.
Ethnic Gourmet's parent company, Hain Celestial, has hired the infamous union-busting law firm, Jackson Lewis, to "negotiate" with the workers in Boston on Tuesday, April 4.
Ethnic Gourmet Foods produces frozen foods sold widely at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. It is owed by Heinz and the Hain-Celestial Group, a huge natural and organic products company whose brands include Celestial Seasonings, Terra Chips, and Soy Dream.
Leaders of the 70 workers at the Framingham Ethnic Gourmet plant have faced daily threats of firing and other reprisals due to their attempts to assert their rights.
On March 15, the workers decided to stand up to management's request to resubmit their papers, a tactic to intimidate them into quitting so the factory can avoid its obligations to employees under the WARN Act.
WARN, the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers to provide 60, days notice of plant closings. Ethnic Gourmet plans to close the factory without formal notification to the workers or any compensation.
Workers have submitted a petition requesting a fair severance of $4,800 each, and an end to retaliation and intimidation.
Ethnic Gourmet has a long history of abusive and illegal employment practices:
• Workers complain about a series of serious irregularities with deductions from their paychecks.
• When eight workers from the cooking crew engaged in a work stoppage to protest that their pay checks were more than a week late, plant management threatened to call police and immigration authorities, and locked the workers for several hours in a room to keep the protest from spreading to the rest of the factory.
• Workers injured at the plant are often left to pay the medical bills themselves.
• For years, the company has maintained a legal fiction in an attempted to insulate itself from its obligations to the workers. They pay 85 percent of the workforce through two labor contractors with no function but to issue pay checks. The contractors have no role in hiring, supervision or firing, and workers have no contact with them for months at a time.
• Workers have been threatened with firing for such frivolous reasons as taking bathroom breaks. Supporters of these workers are calling on people to call, email, and FAX Ethnic Gourmet & Hain-Celestial to demand compensation and an end to intimidation.
Phone: (508) 872-7924 or (508) 875-6212 ext. 29 - manager, Framingham Ethnic Gourmet factory (631) 730-2200 - Hain-Celestial Fax: (508) 875-6457 - Framingham Ethnic Gourmet (631) 730-2550 - Hain-Celestial Email: http://www.hain-celestial.com/about_us/contact_us.php
please Cc: amee@cpaboston and dlow@amigosparalapaz.org