Brooklyn Paper: Hummus war! Workers were fired — and now you can’t get your chickpea dip

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/34/13/all_hummuswar_2011_4_1_bk.html?comm=1

April 1, 2011 / Brooklyn news / Williamsburg

By Aaron Short
The Brooklyn Paper

Call them has-beans.

Three Brooklyn grocery stores are boycotting a Williamsburg manufacturer’s kosher hummus after several factory workers claimed that they were illegally fired and are owed thousands in back wages.

The Associated Supermarket on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope pulled containers of Sonny and Joe’s brand hummus from its shelves last week, joining the Park Slope Food Coop, whose members voted to ban the pita partner last November; and Brooklyn Fare, a Boerum Hill store that stopped carrying it earlier this month.

“The company is not paying the workers,” said Associated manger Alex Alomri. “That’s the reason we don’t buy from them.”

Sonny and Joe’s is one of several brands made by Flaum’s Appetizing on Scholes Street, which has been manufacturing kosher foods since 1918.

Its workers, many of whom hail from Mexico and Central America, have bitterly complained about unkosher working conditions at the factory for nearly a decade.

Company President Moshe Grudhut fired 17 workers after they tried to form a union — and briefly went on strike — in 2008.

FULL story at link.

[handmade34]

1. time to start employee owned businesses!!!

[eleny]

2. Get your act together, Moshe!

Williamsburg, Brooklyn is such an important place to my family. Mom's immigrant parents settled and got married there. Mom was born there. Mom & dad were married in Annunciation Church, so us kids were baptized there. And we attended many Lithuanian masses held in the church.

Then mom & dad worked in a clothing factory in the neighborhood when us kids were in college. Many fun, local stories like the one about the guy who's store sign read, "Eat my knishes and be ambitious". And the horseradish place where the customers ran outside when the proprietor would grind the roots for their order.

I can't read anything related to the area without breaking out in nostalgia. And I hope Grudhut gets his damned act together.

K&R

[SharonAnn]

3. Sort of like the Kosher meat packing plant in Iowa and its treatment

of immigrant workers.