Food Workers Find Doors Barred on Day of Union Protest

A little after 6:30 in the morning on Feb. 2, Paul Andrade took a break from his job as a cook in Inglewood. He headed for an exit at the Flying Food building on Hillcrest Boulevard, not far from Los Angeles International Airport. His car was parked nearby, and “I had to go feed the meter,” Andrade said.

Andrade has worked for nearly 11 years at Flying Food Group, whose business is centered around airline catering. But on this morning, the atmosphere felt very different.
 

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For one thing, Andrade noticed that the number of security guards working at that time of the day was triple their normal count — six guards, rather than two. For another, when he got to the metal gate that opens onto Hillcrest, it wouldn’t budge.

“The guard said it was out of service,” Andrade said. “They had me go use the truck exit instead.”

Half an hour later, Gary Duplessis had a similar experience. Trying to exit the hot kitchen, where he and other cooks often work over open flames, Duplessis went out the nearest door, known as the dispatch door, which is also the designated emergency exit from the kitchen.

“Workers were drilling on the door when I went out,” Duplessis said. “When I came back, that door wouldn’t open from the inside to the outside. Any door that is an emergency exit should never be bolted shut. I was like, what in the hell is going on?”

The alleged answer to that question is now the subject of multiple complaints to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and to Cal/OSHA, the state’s division of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And the workers say they don’t have to guess.

They’re unionized. They’re without a contract. They were planning an informational picket in front of the building. And both the dispatch door and the gates provide direct access to Hillcrest Boulevard, where the event was held later that day.

“It was a tactic to intimidate us as workers,” said Andrade. “And with the extra security, it was like we were being watched the whole time. It felt like being on the inside of a prison.”

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In fact, it was a union representative, Jacqueline Perez of UNITE HERE Local 11, whose actions helped document some of what’s in the NLRB and Cal/OSHA complaints. On site that day in advance of the scheduled early-afternoon picket, Perez took video of the dispatch door, which clearly shows that a screwplate had been bolted onto the door and its metal doorframe from the outside. It’s the same type of bar that Andrade said he noticed on the gates when he tried to leave and was instructed to use a different exit.

A union representative shot cell phone footage of an exit door bolted shut.

UNITE HERE has represented the 346 workers at Flying Food’s Hillcrest location since 2016 and has negotiated two previous contracts with the company. The most recent contract expired last summer, and a six-month extension that ended Jan. 31 produced little progress. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

The union is pushing for higher wages from Flying Food, which generally pays the minimum, $18.04 an hour, that is required under the Los Angeles World Airports living wage ordinance. Union sources say the company has resisted an increase and is also trying to roll back family health care provisions for workers, a tactic employed by other airline food services.

Even with negotiations grinding, workers and union organizers said they were stunned to find doors and gates bolted shut on the day of the picket, for which flyers had been posted around the building inviting workers to join in before or after work or during a break.

“I just immediately became concerned,” said Perez, who alerted a human resources representative with the company as soon as she realized the dispatch door would not open. “We had no idea what was going on.”

When the HR representative and Perez walked outside and around to the door, she said, they found the screwplate that prevented it from opening. “I said, ‘I’m calling the fire marshal,’” Perez said. The HR employee quickly called another person in her department, Juan Vargas. A few minutes later, a maintenance man arrived to remove the plate. Perez asked if he’d been the one who installed it in the first place. He nodded, she said, but refused to speak with her.

By the time the Los Angeles County Fire Department arrived, more than an hour had passed. The LAFD found no plates bolted on to any doors or gates. But in addition to Perez’s video of the dispatch door with the plated bolted onto it, she and several workers found the drill holes in the front gate where Andrade had seen a plate bolted on, and similar holes were found on another door, near the employee cafeteria.

Both the kitchen-area dispatch door and the front gates provide direct access to the area on Hillcrest Boulevard where workers were to gather later in the day. The event went off as scheduled, union organizers said.

The union’s NLRB complaints allege the company interfered with workers’ rights to organize by obstructing multiple exits from the building and “surveilling, or giving the appearance of surveilling, employees engaging in protected concerted activities.” The Cal/OSHA complaint is directed at the safety violations that ensue from having multiple exits blocked, including the designated emergency exit from the hot kitchen.

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Multiple calls to Flying Food human resources and operations departments went unanswered. Lucy Osoro, general manager of the Hillcrest facility, did not respond to emails requesting comment. Reached by phone, Vargas, the human resources employee who was called when a colleague saw the bolted dispatch door, said, “Unfortunately, I am not able to speak about that at this time.”

John Eagan, general counsel for Flying Food Group, which has 15 facilities across the U.S., provided a statement to Capital & Main that he described as “our official comment on the incident.”

“The health and wellbeing of our employees in Los Angeles is incredibly important to Flying Food Group, as is our responsibility to maintain a secure facility,” the statement read. “In keeping with those commitments, we identified a single door that required additional attention to ensure it was appropriately secured. This action did not put any employee health or safety in jeopardy. This was confirmed by the County of Los Angeles Fire Department, which has inspected our facility and found that Flying Food Group did not commit any safety violations.”

Perez said she used the dispatch door the evening before the scheduled picket. It worked normally. Workers said that as soon as the screwplate was removed on Feb. 2, the door again functioned normally.

“Their intention was to shut us in,” said Duplessis. “It was just strange that they would go to such desperate measures for a picket.”

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