Eastern Fisheries, one of New Bedford’s largest seafood processing operations, has notified as many as 200 workers that the company plans to fire them by terminating their contract with local temp services that placed them in Eastern Fisheries’ seafood processing plants in New Bedford.
The termination notices, which several workers shared with The Public’s Radio, were delivered in early February and take effect next week. The notices invite workers to reapply for direct employment with Eastern Fisheries. Representatives from Eastern Fisheries did not respond to repeated requests for additional information.
Four workers said in separate interviews with The Public’s Radio that they suspect they are being fired for collectively organizing for better treatment in the workplace. They claim the terminations are illegal, and a nonprofit legal services organization filed an unfair labor charge on their behalf this week with the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency which confirmed it is already investigating the terminations.
Many of the workers who process seafood for Eastern Fisheries are immigrants from Central America who rely on temporary employment agencies as a way of securing jobs regardless of their immigration status. The workers facing termination were hired through a pair of temporary employment agencies in New Bedford: B.J.’s and Masis Staffing Solutions, according to notices Eastern Fisheries sent to employees and later obtained by The Public’s Radio.
Despite their temporary status, many of these workers have been cleaning, cutting and packaging fish at Eastern Fisheries for years.
“For them, it is a problem when workers organize,” said a New Bedford seafood processing worker named Mary, who requested that her last name be withheld. “The people who are part of B.J.’s make a lot of trouble. They say that’s why they don’t want us there anymore.”
Several workers said that Eastern Fisheries’ offer to re-employ some of the seafood processing workers directly is an effort to weed out those who have been meeting with a local workers rights advocacy organization, the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores.
Workers from Eastern Fisheries have been organizing with the center for years as part of a broader effort to get seafood processing companies across the city to adopt a unified code of conduct for the treatment of their workers. But workers also raised complaints specific to Eastern Fisheries in a letter to the company’s president, Roy Enoksen, in January 2022.
The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Public’s Radio, covers a wide range of alleged workplace issues, from low wages to inadequate medical treatment to sexual advances and inappropriate comments that workers claim their supervisors have subjected them to.
The letter also raises concerns about production quotas that workers say Eastern Fisheries instated at a new processing plant the company opened in the New Bedford Industrial Park the same month. Several workers told The Public’s Radio that the quotas make it difficult for them to take breaks during long shifts operating dangerous equipment, or even to use the bathroom.
“We are feeling unfairly overworked and disrespected, especially since we made the move to Eastern’s new facility,” said the letter, which was addressed to Enoksen in both English and Spanish. “Recently, a co-worker of ours, Ruth Castro, who spoke up on our behalf about this issue was unfairly fired.”
“Without Ruth on the job,” the letter continued, “we are worried that the workplace will become an even more dangerous and disrespectful place than it currently is.”
Justice at Work, the legal services group that filed an unfair labor charge this week on behalf of the workers facing termination, reached a settlement with Eastern Fisheries on Castro’s behalf earlier this year.
Thomas Smith, Justice at Work’s executive director, said that Eastern Fisheries agreed to rehire Castro and compensate her for about nine months of back pay she missed while she was fired. Castro returned to work on March 21.
But now, Castro is among the employees at the company facing a mass termination on Sunday.
“Because of my case, they’re trying to retaliate against the other workers too,” Castro said in an interview that was translated from Spanish.
Though exact employment figures are difficult to pin down in one of the East Coast’s largest seafood companies, the unfair labor charge filed with the NLRB estimates that roughly 200 workers face termination.
At a confrontation at one of Eastern Fisheries’ New Bedford plants on Thursday, an activist from the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores delivered a letter to an Eastern Fisheries executive at the company’s front door before the activist and several reporters watching the interaction were ordered to leave the property.
The letter asks management to delay the terminations until the NLRB has completed its investigation.
The Eastern Fisheries executive who accepted the letter, Vice President of Operations Michael Anthony, refused to read it and insisted that the activist place it inside a folder “on the advice of counsel.” The activist, Adrián Ventura, said workers inside the plant delivered the same letter to a manager and received a similar response.
Outside the plant, Ventura, who is the executive director of the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), told reporters that the terminations amount to retaliation.
“It’s clear vengeance,” Ventura said in Spanish. “There are four witnesses who said that their supervisors told them that this is happening because they organized with CCT.”
“They don’t want them to get organized,” Ventura said.
Ventura said those four workers have already given statements to an investigator from the NLRB.
An NLRB lawyer interviewing workers this week at the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores declined to comment but identified herself as Meredith Garry. Garry has worked on several NLRB cases in which immigrants in New Bedford alleged their employers fired them in retaliation for protected workplace organizing.
The Public’s Radio’s Nadine Sebai contributed reporting for this story. Ben Berke is the South Coast Bureau Reporter for The Public’s Radio. He can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org. Follow him on Twitter @BenBerke6.
