Martin Hernandez was moving heavy boxes of merchandise at a Brooklyn warehouse belonging to the electronics superstore B&H Photo Video in late August, he said, when he felt a sudden stab of pain in his left leg.þþ“I felt my knee crack, and I just couldn’t get up,” he said on Tuesday, through a Spanish-English interpreter. “The pain was so intense, I couldn’t feel my foot.”þþMr. Hernandez, 48, said he had been taken by ambulance to the Brooklyn Hospital Center. He eventually learned he had a damaged ligament, and has not worked or received a paycheck since the injury. He said his meager savings were nearly exhausted.þþOn Tuesday, an organizer with the United Steelworkers union filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking for a vote among warehouse workers — including Mr. Hernandez — on whether they want the union to represent them. Workers had complained that they had been forced to work long hours in unsafe environments without proper training, while subject to discrimination.þþ“This is an employer who had been negligent and unconcerned about unhealthy working conditions and health problems,” said Arturo Archila, the union organizer. He said he expected a vote to take place within 25 or 26 days.þþKristina A. Mazzocchi, a lawyer representing many of the workers, said more than 80 percent of the 240 people working in two B&H warehouses in Bushwick and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard had signed cards saying they wanted to be represented by the Steelworkers.þþHershel Jacobowitz, a senior executive vice president at B&H, said the company treated its workers well.þþ“B&H provides terrific benefits, highly competitive wages and a safe, friendly environment,” Mr. Jacobowitz said. He added that the company “has been and remains committed to the satisfaction of our employees.”þþA Midtown institution for decades, B&H ships electronic equipment across the country as part of a successful mail-order business. The company has been known for expert advice to customers and for catalogs practically the size of a Manhattan phone book that are filled with listings and promotions for professional-grade cameras, wide-screen televisions and exotic surveillance equipment like a baseball cap equipped with a hidden high-definition camera.þþWhile many buyers praise the company, it has sometimes had a rocky relationship with employees. In 2007, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that B&H had agreed to pay $4.3 million to settle a discrimination case stemming from claims that the company paid Hispanic employees in its warehouses less than other workers and failed to promote them or provide health benefits.þþThe first notice to B&H of the latest complaints came on Sunday, when a crowd of about 300 people held a raucous demonstration on the sidewalk outside the store, on Ninth Avenue and 34th Street. While some employees and supporters briefly paraded through the premises, the Steelworkers delivered a letter addressed to the company’s owner, Herman Schreiber, and its chief executive officer and president, Sam Goldstein, asking to be acknowledged as the “sole and exclusive bargaining representative of the employees.”þþAdvertisementþþContinue reading the main storyþAdvertisementþþContinue reading the main storyþþMs. Mazzocchi also dropped off a letter addressed to Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Goldstein, asking that they act on complaints that employees had been subject to discrimination because they are Hispanic, had been pressured by managers to sign English-language forms releasing the company from medical claims and had been forced to work long hours in warehouses where emergency exits were blocked and noxious dust appeared to cause rashes and nosebleeds. She said that if she and other lawyers did not receive a favorable reply by Oct. 20, they would file 180 separate claims with the E.E.O.C.þþMahoma Lopez, a co-director of the Laundry Workers Center, an advocacy group that works mainly with low-income immigrant workers, said they had begun meeting last year with B&H warehouse employees. The center’s organizers held workshops in which they instructed workers about their legal rights, he said, and explained that they would have more strength working together than they would as individuals. Eventually, Mr. Lopez said, the center helped the warehouse employees contact the Steelworkers union.þþOne of the workers who said he had wanted to be represented by United Steelworkers was Mario Baten, 29, who said he had worked for B&H for six years but had temporarily lost his job in 2010 after he collapsed at work. Mr. Baten, who said he had suffered for years from cancer, said through a Spanish-English interpreter he had awoken in a hospital and received documents that had been delivered to him by a B&H manager.þþ“He sent papers in English that I had to sign,” he said. “I didn’t know what they were saying.”
Source: NY Times
