NYT: New Owners, and New Labor Complaints

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/new-owners-and-new-labor-complaints/?ref=todayspaper

January 5, 2011, 3:26 pm

By SAM DOLNICK


Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Plus ça change: workers protesting outside the Saigon Grill on Amsterdam Avenue in March 2007.


If some restaurants are cursed with bad locations, maybe others are cursed with bad labor relations. Two years after a federal judge awarded $4.6 million to delivery workers at the Saigon Grill, a Manhattan noodle house, to compensate for their severe exploitation, the restaurant’s new owners face a fresh round of claims of worker discrimination and intimidation.

A restaurant workers’ union filed a complaint with federal authorities last month accusing the new owners of harassing and firing workers who protested age discrimination and expressed support for joining a union. Bei Lin and Qiao Lin, brothers who now own the restaurant , threatened the employees, manipulated work schedules to decrease their tips, and fired many who objected, according to the complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board by the 318 Restaurant Workers Union.

Since November, former employees and workers’ advocates have been protesting five days a week outside the Saigon Grill at 620 Amsterdam Avenue at 90th Street. They have set up a Web site urging neighbors to boycott the restaurant, taking up a tactic used during the last round of the labor fight.

The Saigon Grill, a neighborhood haunt popular for its spring rolls and coconut soup, has been at various locations on the Upper West Side since 1996. It has had high Zagat ratings for food, as high as 23 out of a possible 30.

But the previous owners, Simon and Michelle Nget, paid delivery workers less than $2 an hour, and systematically cheated the staff out of tips and wages, a federal judge found in 2008. When the extent of the labor violations became clear, many Upper West Siders, a group known for its deeply liberal politics, were left uneasy at the scale of mistreatment in their midst.

FULL story at link.