Politicians join students in fair labor campaign

“Hey hey, ho ho, sweatshop labor’s got to go!” is a familiar sound at the corner of 90th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, where picketers have been calling for a boycott of Saigon Grill for five months.

On Saturday, the Upper West Side Vietnamese noodle restaurant got its biggest spotlight yet—serving as a backdrop for the launch of the Sweatshop Free Upper West Side campaign.

New York State Senators Adriano Espaillat and Tom Duane, with City Council member Gale Brewer and State Assembly member Linda Rosenthal, joined local activist organizations, students and church groups in an effort to get businesses to pledge their support for enforcing fair labor practices.

At Saigon Grill, employees say that working conditions haven’t improved since new owners, brothers Bei and Qiao Lin, bought the restaurant in October 2010. Vincent Cao said he and several other waiters were fired in October for speaking out against the Lins’ plan to fire several employees for being too old.

“They are 50, 60 years old, these workers, and he’s trying to fire them,” Cao explained. “We spoke out and said that’s age discrimination. So then all the younger workers who spoke up were fired.”

The Sweatshop Free Upper West Side campaign is an effort to stop similar alleged abuses. About a dozen restaurants, markets, and shops have already signed the pledge, including Uptown Whole Foods, whose owner, Gary Null, spoke at Saturday afternoon’s rally.

“We should not be talking about minimal wage. I believe we should only be talking about living wage,” Null said to loud cheers from the crowd. “If you thought of your employees as a family, you’d treat them as a family.”

Speakers at the rally urged attendees to canvas the Upper West Side on April 9 to get local stores to sign the pledge, something that members of some campus groups have committed to doing.

The campaign will distribute stickers for businesses that commit to the fair-labor standards to display, and Espaillat said he’ll be helping to further the goals of Cao and other activists, who have been picketing Saigon five days a week since November.

“I will be personally asking the Attorney General’s office to take a look at the practice of this restaurant … to see if there’s any criminal action happening with the owner,” Espaillat told Spectator on Saturday.

Saigon Grill has been embroiled in legal battles over fair labor practices since 2007, when some staff members were fired because they claimed the owners, Simon and Michelle Nget, paid delivery workers less than $2 an hour and cheated employees out of tips.

In 2008, a federal judge ruled in favor of the employees, awarding them $4.6 million and sentencing Simon Nget to 90 days in jail and five years of probation, though his wife Michelle has not yet been sentenced.

Rose Michaels, BC ’13 and a member of LUCHA, the campus Latino activist group, said it’s important “that everyone is aware of what’s going on. We need to make sure the community is in solidarity.”

“Once other businesses saw what happened here, they raised their labor standards,” Cindy Gao, CC ’12 and political chair of the Asian American Alliance, said of Saigon Grill.

And despite the focus on the neighborhood as a whole, Saigon Grill is still in the middle of the fray.

Cao said that current employees are afraid to speak out against the Lins because they fear losing their jobs. Espaillat, however, said he would personally approach the workers afraid to speak out.

“They should feel reassured that the city will protect the workers, this is a city that has a history of protecting its workers,” he said.

But Rui Wang, an assistant manager at the restaurant, said that the men who claim to have been fired are lying.

“The protesters outside, they never worked here before—not with the old management or with the new management,” Wang said. When asked about Cao, Wang said, “That is a name I do not recognize.”

Wang has said for months that the protestors are unfairly projecting the practices of the former management onto the new one.

“This is a restaurant, not a sweatshop,” he said. “With the old management, it was true that they had problems with the delivery guys at that time. But they already solved that situation.”

Three current Saigon employees also staged a counterprotest next to the rally. While refusing to speak with the press, they handed out a flier criticizing the two unions to which Saigon Grill employees belong, telling them, “Stop pretending that you are fighting for workers’ rights!”

According to the flier, Wing Lam, executive director of the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, “has caused hundreds of workers who did not want to participate in his wallet-fattening scheme to lose their jobs.”

Wendy Cheung, a staff organizer at the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association and Justice Will Be Served!, said that those accusations had been fed to the current employees by the Lins.

“The employers are putting out false statements, pitting the workers on the inside against workers on the outside,” she said. “It’s a tactic to keep workers from coming together to organize for better conditions.”

Saturday’s protest attracted about 100 people to the restaurant, including Louise Velez, a Lower East Side resident who came to the opposite corner of the island to support the campaign.

“I can’t believe this is happening here,” she said. “The new owner is doing what the first owner did. They need to launch an investigation on this man.”

Rosenthal also spoke at the rally, which fell one day after the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The 1911 tragedy killed 146 garment workers who were locked in a room with no access to a fire escape.

Rosenthal reminded the crowd that most of the workers who died in that fire were put at risk due to poor labor and safety laws.

“It’s a shame that 100 years later we’re still fighting some of the same battles here on the Upper West Side,” she said.

finn.vigeland@columbiaspectator.com