Feds check out firm supplying crawfish to Sam’s Club

18th June 2012   ·   0 Comments

By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer

Mexican guest workers are waiting to hear more about complaints filed early this month with federal authorities against their employer, C.J.’s Seafood in Breaux Bridge. Eight C.J.’s workers, who walked off the job on June 4 because of unpaid wages and harsh conditions, are now staying in New Orleans.

Breaux Bridge, near Lafayette, is known as the “Crawfish Capital of the World.” C.J.’s brings in foreign workers under the federal H-2B program for seasonal, non-agricultural labor. The firm sells most of its crawfish to Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart Stores.

The eight striking workers and their supporters held a protest outside the Sam’s Club on Airline Drive in Metairie on June 6. But last week, the store still had C.J.’s products on its shelves, according to Jacob Horwitz, lead organizer with the National Guestworker Alliance in New Orleans.

Carrie Foster, spokeswoman for Sam’s Club, said “C.J.’s Seafood has supplied crawfish, as needed, to a limited number of Sam’s Club locations in the Louisiana region for almost a decade.” She said Wal-Mart began investigating C.J.’s as soon as reports surfaced that might conflict with the company’s sourcing policies. “We expect our suppliers to adhere to Wal-Mart’s rigorous Standards for Suppliers code of conduct,” she said.

As of last week, Wal-Mart had already looked into the situation at C.J.’s. “Following our investigation, as well as investigations by the U.S. Dept. of Labor and OSHA, at this time we are unable to substantiate claims of forced labor or human trafficking at C.J.’s Seafood,” Foster said.

But DOL spokeswoman Elizabeth Todd, based in Dallas, said last week that federal reviews are still underway. “The Dept. of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are investigating the incident involving C.J.’s Seafood,” she said. “The Depart­ment does not comment during an open investigation.”

And Horwitz said that Wal-Mart had not talked with any of the eight striking workers.

What happened at C.J.’s? About 40 H-2B guest workers arrived in Breaux Bridge from Mexico’s Tamaulipas State in February, expecting to peel and boil crawfish through late July. But tensions erupted at the plant. Horwitz said “C.J.’s failed to pay overtime to the Mexican workers and didn’t keep records required by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The company threatened the workers, sometimes with violence, and subjected them to other unfair labor practices.” C.J.’s peelers work shifts that start at 2:00 in the morning and end at 5:00 in the afternoon. Boilers work shifts of 24 hours each, three days a week. Workers are paid a base wage of $8.53 an hour.

On June 6, the National Guest­worker Alliance filed a complaint for the eight striking workers with the Dept. of Labor about overtime. On the same day, the New Orleans Center for Racial Justice filed an complaint about racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saying the Mexicans were more harshly treated than the plant’s African-American and white American workers. NGA is a project of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice.

Horwitz, who speaks Spanish, relayed what he was told by the Mexican workers about C.J.’s. The company went from hiring six H-2B workers eight years ago to 40 of them this year, he said. “Many have returned, but conditions at the plant have declined. Workers who first started coming years ago said conditions weren’t good then, and now they’re unbearable.” Over the years, work shifts have gotten much longer. This year, doors were blocked at times to prevent the Mexican employees from taking breaks.

A female guest worker called 911 in late May to report unpaid overtime and other complaints, Horwitz said. A St. Martin’s Parish Sheriff’s deputy responded to the call and spoke to plant owner Mike LeBlanc. LeBlanc is also the director of the Crawfish Processors Al­liance, an industry group. “The worker who made the 911 call was asked to talk with them, but she was terrified and said it was all a mis­take,” Horwitz said. None­theless, the Dept. of Labor contacted the company.

Horwitz said “the employer reacted to the worker’s 911 call by trying to silence the Mexican workers. He held a meeting with the guest workers at 2:30 in the morning, and told them he knew good people and bad people in Mexico and knew where their families live. He said if they went against his family, he would go against theirs. In other words, he threatened them.”

Mike LeBlanc did not respond to a number of phone calls to C.J.’s last week for his version of events.

While eight workers went on strike, other Mexicans are still at the plant. One of the striking workers staying in New Orleans is Ana Diaz, a mother of four children and her family’s breadwinner. She said last week that in addition to about 40 Mexican guest workers, the plant employs 10 Americans—seven African Americans and three whites. One of the white workers is Mike LeBlanc’s aunt and a supervisor. Diaz said the Mexican workers are housed in crowded trailers and an apartment—all without air conditioning—next to the plant. Workers sleep in small bunk beds. Nine people bunk in a large but cramped trailer. Five people share an apartment. Four to six people share a bathroom. “There are only four washing machines for 48 people, and your clothes get really smelly,” Diaz said.

Workers cook in their lodgings. “We were paying $2.00 to a driver to take us to buy groceries,” Diaz said. And where did they buy them? At a nearby Wal-Mart.

C.J.’s guest workers don’t stay out late because LeBlanc insists they return by 9:00 p.m,. and he calls them on their cell phones if they don’t meet his curfew, Horwitz said.

Ashley Roth, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, said last week that the board couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations of C.J.’s. But she said “I do know several processors who run successful H-2B programs,” and she mentioned Frank Randol of Ran­dol’s Seafood in Lafayette.

Frank Randol, who employed 27 Mexican guest workers this spring to peel and boil crawfish, said he and many other local processors try to look after their foreign employees. “Not only is that the right thing to do, but you have a better product that way,” he said. “And demand for skilled H-2B seafood workers is greater than the supply. We want them to come back.” He doesn’t provide housing, which he said isn’t required under the H-2B program.

Randol, who also runs Randol’s Restaurant et Salle de Danse in Lafayette, said the costs to U.S. employers of hiring H-2B workers, including visas and processing fees, keeps rising. “The bureaucracy and paperwork in the U.S. and Mexico have become a real headache,” he said. “If we could hire all local people, I’d certainly prefer to do that.” But he said he can’t find enough workers along the coast for his processing operation.

Louisiana brings in 3,300 H-2B workers a year, and is the nation’s third largest H-2B employer after Texas and Maryland, according to the Dept. of Labor. Seafood processing employs over 1,400 guest workers in Louisiana annually. Workers can have a good or bad experience in the H-2B system. In a well-run plant, guest workers are fairly paid, see a little of the United States and return to their home country with money for their families. In a bad plant, workers face exploitation, health and safety issues, and retaliation by employers if they complain. Some plants hold wages down through a piecework-payment system.

Horwitz believes that Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart have profited from C.J.’s practice of underpaying and overworking H-2B employees. Wal-Mart’s efforts to keep its prices low can affect its U.S. and foreign suppliers, he said. The National Guestworker Alliance encourages anyone interested in learning more about H-2B workers and in signing a petition to stop Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart from buying C.J.’s crawfish to visit its website at www.guestworkeralliance.org.

For its part, Wal-Mart, in its ethical sourcing guidelines, says it wants to make sure the products it sells are produced in a way that respects workers in its supply chain.

Meanwhile, the Crawfish Pro­cessors Alliance is fighting the Dept. of Labor’s efforts to improve pay for H-2B guest workers. The group would also like to see the cap of 66,000 H-2B workers, allowed into the U.S. yearly, raised.

This article was originally published in the June 18, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper