Kosher business refuses to pay $260,000 in back wages to fired workers

http://www.iww.org/en/node/5278

ubmitted by intexile on Sat, 11/27/2010 - 1:39pm.

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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 , 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.

FULL story at link.

Snipped from the article:

"We can't just focus on ritual and ignore the ethical side," said Ari Hart, co-founder of the group Uri L'Tzedek, which translates as Awaken to Justice.

"The Torah talks in multiple places about how it's really important to pay a worker the worker's full wages and respect a worker," Hart said.

work for eleven years and let the company get away without paying federally mandated overtime. Workers do need to stand up for themselves.

Here in New Mexico, if a company gets nailed doing that, they are subject to being paid triple, yes triple what should have been paid.

Oh, and the law does not care if the employee is a Christian, a Jew, and atheist, a legal or illegal alien. It only cares that workers are paid what they're supposed to be paid.

The police had to escort the crooks from the property. They were going to kill them.