Courtesy of Amy’s Kitchen
Five days a week for almost seven years, Maria del Carmen Gonzalez, a 48-year-old woman, has worked at Amy’s Kitchen, an organic packaged food company located in Petaluma, California. She suffered a severe work-related shoulder injury in April 2021, and wasn’t able to get surgery for the injury until last month. She has worried that she might one day be fired. She doesn’t speak English and says that has limited her ability to find other employment opportunities.
While Amy’s Kitchen promotes itself as a family and an ethically conscious food company, what happens behind closed doors reveals a starkly different picture.
In recent months, the company has come under a barrage of boycotts over escalating reports of unsafe working conditions and recalls of some of its vegan dishes that contained trace amounts
of dairy. In March, a TikTok that went viral showed an alleged former quality control worker saying Amy’s Kitchen treated allergens like a joke, adding, “That’s the least of [the company’s] problems.” He ended the video by saying he was bound by a nondisclosure agreement, so he couldn’t say much more.
The boycotts against Amy’s Kitchen have been led by independent organizations such as the Food Empowerment Project (FEP) and Veggie Mijas. Food co-ops, including the People’s Food Co-op and Alberta Co-op, also called for boycotts after learning about FEP and Veggie Mijas’s findings from their interaction with the company’s workers. Both co-ops pulled Amy’s Kitchen’s products from their shelves and notified their customers about why they were doing so. A spokesperson for the FEP told the Prospect, “Amy’s Kitchen is throwing all this money [at union-busting], and the requests from workers aren’t unreasonable.”
The Prospect has reviewed a formal complaint filed to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health on behalf of a worker named Cecilia Luna Ojeda and her co-workers at a company facility in Santa Rosa, California. The Cal/OSHA complaint includes the testimony of several other anonymous workers, translated from Spanish to English. The workers testified to a number of health and safety hazards, multiple worker injuries from high-speed production, violations of management and system procedures, and more. The Prospect has also conducted an interview with Gonzalez, who described an employer that has lied countless times and disregarded doctor-ordered health protocols for its majority-Latina workforce, while wrongfully terminating multiple workers.
As of March 2021, B Lab, a business certification organization, recognized Amy’s Kitchen with a B Corp Certification. The B Corp label signals to consumers and investors that the company defines itself as socially responsible and has abided by B Lab Network’s requirement system for credentialization.
But in March of this year, Teamsters Local 665 Principal Officer Tony Delorio filed a complaint on behalf of Ojeda against the company’s B Corp status. Delorio wrote, “Amy’s Kitchen has demonstrated a callous disregard for workers’ health, safety, and human rights in violation of the B Corp Declaration of Interdependence.” The complaint cites the more than $100,000 the company has paid to settle “serious” federal health and safety violations documented by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Delorio’s complaint also asserts that Amy’s Kitchen failed to disclose $95,750 of the total while applying for the B Corp Certification.
While Amy’s Kitchen promotes itself as a family and an ethically conscious food company, what happens behind closed doors reveals a starkly different picture.
NBC reported that in 2019, regulators found seven serious OSHA violations at the Santa Rosa facility that led the agency to impose $89,100 in penalties, and that the company contested the citations. Additionally, in 2018, the company was cited by OSHA for violations at its plants in Idaho and Oregon, paying a total of $23,135 and $6,000, respectively, in settlements and fines.
Delorio is urging B Lab to hold Amy’s Kitchen to the standards the organization professes to uphold. “I hope your investigation will consider the experiences of Cecilia and her co-workers and not just rely on the company’s account,” said Delorio.
One of the anonymous workers who has been at the company for 27 years explained in the complaint to Cal/OSHA that since 2004, she has suffered from a severe shoulder injury. When the company’s HR department finally sent her to physical therapy, she testified, the treatment didn’t help her, nor did her workload decrease in the subsequent years. In May 2021, after 16 years of working with her injury, she suffered an anxiety attack on the job. Her doctor’s orders required that she needed a chair to continue working, but the company claimed it did not have any to provide. Instead, she was forced to assemble her own chair, using cardboard.
One of Gonzalez’s central concerns was the immense toll Amy’s Kitchen’s production methods put on her and co-workers’ bodies. The problem was augmented by the long shifts it imposed on them. Management, she said, has constantly lied about the amount of time they would spend working, which was shorter than the amount of time they actually had to work. During meetings with managers, she said, they would tell workers that tasks like food packaging should only take three to four hours. Instead, Gonzalez and her co-workers spend upward of nine hours packaging food.
A separate worker account detailed how workers on the production line are expected to prepare 72 plates per minute for six hours. The worker added that the repetitive task requires workers to twist their bodies left and right for hours on end. “If the goal is not met, the person will be fired,” she wrote. Over the years, this worker has been injured on the job on three separate occasions, and because of the poor quality of her health insurance, she’s been unable to book a doctor’s appointment.
According to another worker’s testimony, the company’s safety protocol calls for production stops every half hour for a stretch, and for rotations every hour. But that rule is hardly followed, and when workers try to bring it up with managers, many of them respond with apathy and say it’s the responsibility of workers, not management, to stop production. Gonzalez confirmed this account. She said, “We’re left with no time for a break to stretch.”
Gonzalez told the Prospect that her shoulder injury required surgery and that she couldn’t lift more than five pounds once she returned to work. In response, the company moved her to the burrito line, where she was forced to do work that ignored the stipulations in her doctor’s note. The company claimed that the doctor’s note wasn’t specific enough. Gonzalez then went back to her doctor for a more specific note. She now worries she’ll be fired if she speaks up again because she knows other workers who’ve been fired in the past under similar circumstances. She said there are often several injured women on the job on a given day.
In addition to the repetitive movements, other workers detailed an unsafe environment that included wet, damaged mats, leaving workers in danger of slipping. They noted that work often occurs in extreme temperatures, and with the exits blocked. “I think people are afraid,” one worker wrote. “[The temperature] can lead to fainting from a heat wave.”
A former worker who had been at the company for 17 years had a pipe fall on her head in 2017. Following the incident, she developed a seizure disorder. Last August, she experienced a seizure on the job, was sent home, put on short-term disability, and then in November was notified by the company that she had been fired. According to the former worker, she received a packet from the company that said she had voluntarily quit.
New employees, another worker said, were often scared because they didn’t know the safety protocols. Last November, the company conducted an emergency drill. New workers scrambled to exit the building, creating a chaotic situation in which long-term workers were scared too. One of the testimonies described a worker saying that she was asked by her supervisor how she felt about the incident. She responded, “I am very scared,” because during the drill, the supervisors were removing all the materials and supplies that blocked the emergency exits, to which access was supposed to be unimpeded.
TODAY, GONZALEZ AND A NUMBER of her fellow workers at Amy’s Kitchen are attempting to organize a union. The company is aware of the organizing efforts and has hired the union-busting consultant firm Quest for two of its California facilities, one in Santa Rosa and the other in San Jose.
Since the union-busters have been brought in, Gonzalez describes a tense environment in the plants. “The company says they’re not union-busting,” she says. “So why are they spending so much on these people but not on our [health] insurance?”
On January 1, the company switched its health insurance policy. Gonzalez says she now must choose between keeping her husband on her health insurance plan or feeding her children.
The ongoing organizing efforts, according to Gonzalez, have resulted in management claiming that a union at Amy’s Kitchen would force the company to close down—a common management ploy, and one whose legality is questionable at best. “The company is lying. It’s just sad,” she said. While the union-busters hired by the company say the union will just take their money, she added, they never bring up how things could change with regard to the company’s current practice of at-will employment, under which it can fire workers for no reason, or the fact that a union could negotiate for a pension plan for workers.
Having a union, Gonzalez said, would finally give her and co-workers some peace between each other and the respect and dignity they deserve from management. She added that she wants workers to respect the company, and at the same time she wants the company to value the sacrifices its workers have made for it.
Gonzalez’s and her fellow workers’ grievances aren’t confined to work conditions, low pay, and the absence of respect. What hurts her most, she says, is the psychological toll she leaves with every day: “You get home stressed—lashing out at your family and others who don’t deserve it.”
“It’s not easy leaving our families for eight to ten hours each day,” she said. “If [Amy’s Kitchen says] we are a second family, why aren’t we treated like one?”
Gonzalez has seen the difference a union can make through extended family members who have been in one in the past. “I’m willing to fight until the end,” she said. “Even if I’m scared I’ll get fired.”
In response to the Prospect’s queries, Amy’s Kitchen wrote that the complaint filed with Cal/OSHA over conditions at its Santa Rosa plant was “filled with untruths.” It did not explain why it had been fined by OSHA for previous violations.
The abyss between what the company publicly says and what Gonzalez and her co-workers endure on a daily basis suggests the fight to build a union isn’t going away. Gonzalez says that union representation would take away workers’ daily fear over whether they’ll be fired for no reason. “I’m willing to put my name and face out there because I’m telling the truth,” she says. Amy’s Kitchen, its workers say, is not.
