Exclusive: Celeb-loving organic bread company charged with abuse
Source: Salon.com
Amy's Bread enjoys pristine image, claims it has a celeb clientele -- but workers describe a dark, horrifying truth
Josh Eidelson
With a surprise midday Monday march on management, employees are making public allegations of abuse at the hands of an organic bread company that claims Meg Ryan, Megan Fox and Whoopi Goldberg as customers. The company’s breads are sold by retailers including Whole Foods, Dean and Deluca, and Zabar’s, and at its retail locations in Manhattan; according to an August 2013 internal newsletter, “The Social Network” star Jesse Eisenberg’s ”Amy Bread favorite” is “our daily pizza and a slice of our Yellow cake with Pink frosting.”
“The company has a beautiful and great image … We are the source of that image,” said Ana Rico, an overnight cleaning worker at the company, Amy’s Bread. “We put out work hands on it, our sweat, our time.” She said that comes at a cost: “I’m in pain all the time.” After months of organizing in secret, Rico and other employees and activists are today delivering a petition to the company calling for a living wage, affordable healthcare and respect at work. Their campaign is backed by the non-union labor group Brandworkers and the allied union the Industrial Workers of the World.
Reached by phone Monday morning, Amy’s Bread said founder/owner Amy Scherber was not immediately available to comment. Last year the company opened a 33,000-square-foot factory in Queens, where Brandworkers says about a hundred workers produce all of its bread, and with it over a million dollars in monthly revenue. The company website touts: “We use traditional European methods, and shape every loaf by hand”; “using only natural ingredients, with no artificial additives”; “we use only ‘green’ cleaning products”; and “We believe that the best bread and pastries are made in the Old World way – by hand and enjoyed within hours of being freshly baked!” And it notes that “Our loyal employees have made our success possible.”
But loyalty has its limits. “Every time that I get home, I have to take pills and use creams” for pain, said Rico. She blamed that pain in part on the company’s alleged months-long failure to replace a machine for washing trays, leaving her to scrub 200 clean by hand each night, in “really hot water” (with an ecologically friendly degreaser), along with other duties like vacuuming. Rico told Salon she’d often worked an hour or two past the 4 a.m. end of her shift, but had been told by a manager they were “not allowed to pay overtime.”
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2013/11/25/exclusive_celeb_loving_organic_bread_company_charged_with_abuse/
Jesse Eisenberg, Megan Fox (Credit: AP/Arthur Mola/Jordan Strauss)
= new reply since forum marked as read
