This past Sunday, dozens of B&H workers publicly aired their grievances against their employer, the largest non-chain photo retailer in the country. Employees marched into the NYC store to deliver a letter and launch a campaign calling for the business to “fix dangerous workplace conditions, end discrimination against Latino employees, and stop wage theft at their two Brooklyn warehouses.”
Laura Gottesdiener covered the action for Al Jazeera America (“Photo retailer B&H faces unwanted exposure over worker safety“), writing:
In the main B&H warehouse located in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, the walls and ceilings are insulated with fiberglass that fills the air and flecks off onto the worker’s skin, causing rashes, respiration problems and daily nosebleeds, employees say. Inside a second warehouse, on Evergreen Avenue in Brooklyn, employees say they have worked amid asbestos-insulated tubing. “They would tell us to clean the tubes,” recalled maintenance worker Miguel Angel Muñoz Meneses, “but nobody wanted to touch them.”
The men, many of whom are undocumented, testify of suffering from kidney stones, dizziness and fainting after being denied access to water or bathroom breaks.
…
Stephanie Luce, a professor of labor studies at the Murphy Institute at the City University of New York, said that, if verified, these allegations would constitute violations of the “highest level of basic rights.”
“These are very serious,” Luce said. “That’s one of the main things that happening in places like Bangladesh, where there have been fires and buildings have collapsed, and workers can’t escape.”
B&H declined to comment on any of the specific allegations, including the handling of the 2014 fire.
For further information about specific allegations, B&H’s history of legal settlements and alleged workplace abuses, and the current campaign, read the full article at Al Jazeera America.
