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Looking backward and forward at political power and Boston's elite law firms
C.O.R.I.—the need is for drastic reform
The April 10 immigrants rally in Copley Square
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Without union, immigrant workers still organize and win
On Tuesday, April 4, supporters of the embattled Ethnic Gourmet workforce began informational pickets at local Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Markets.
Trader Joe’s Cambridge manager responded to representatives of immigrant aid groups by calling the police. But when police arrived, they told the leafleters they had a right to remain.
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 reportedly won severance compensation for the factory closing, but had to agree not to speak with reporters.
When supporters picketed 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. 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.
The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires employers to provide sixty days notice of plant closings. Ethnic Gourmet planned to close the Framingham factory without formal notification to the workers or any compensation.
Once, 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.
For years, the company had maintained a legal fiction in an attempt to insulate itself from its obligations to the workers. They paid 85 percent of the workforce through two labor contractors with no function but to issue pay checks. These contractors had no role in hiring, supervision or firing, and workers had no contact with them for months at a time.
Hain Celstial brands include Soy Dream, Celestail Seasonings, Terra Chips, and Ethnic Gourmet foods.
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