Delivery Workers Share Their Plight

Solicitations of support and stories of worker abuse found a home in Hamilton Monday night as fired Saigon Grill delivery workers brought their plight to campus.

Ke Yuguan, who had worked at the 90th Street location of the popular Vietnamese restaurant for 10 years, and Chen Xiang Yi, who had worked there for five years, appeared at a teach-in held by the food service workers rights organization Justice Will Be Served!

Sponsored on campus by the Asian American Alliance Political Committee, Students for Environmental and Economic Justice, Students for a Democratic Society, and LUCHA, the teach-in aimed to inform students of the low wages and poor working conditions that recently-ousted workers have alleged.

Speaking through JWBS-supplied translator Nancy Eng, Ke recounted the "dangerous working conditions" that he alleged "the bosses" put him through. Ke claimed that for the entirety of his ten years, he was paid two dollars per hour.

Among the litany of abuses detailed by Ke and Chen, they alleged that the owners of Saigon Grill had an elaborate system of penalties, docking the wages of deliverymen $20 for complaints from customers for late deliveries, $200 for undelivered orders and $50 for, according to Chen, "shutting the door too loud."

On top of these abuses, Ke and Chen also claimed that if they were attacked or hurt on the job, they were forced to pay for any medical attention themselves, and that any days off they may have had were cancelled in the event of inclement weather, in order to meet increased demand for deliveries.

Following the stories, Josephine Lee, CC '01 and a JWBS coordinator addressed the forty-odd people gathered in the room on what her organization had been doing, as well as what students could do to help the cause of the workers.

"You're smart enough to figure out what's going on here. ...They were fired for organizing," she said, referring to the mass firing of all delivery workers after they refused to accept a new employment contract from their bosses, which still would have left the workers with a wage rate below the federal minimum.

She added that "a coalition of students and labor activists" could effect change here, referencing a similar case that she had been involved in regarding different New York City restaurants that had changed their wage policy following protests.

After the speeches, the room was opened to questions from members of the assembled crowd, which ranged from suggestions for future actions from one unidentified attendee-"Why don't we go to their [the bosses] neighborhood and fuck with them?"-to questions on what legal recourse the fired workers had, to suggestions of the removal of Saigon Grill from the Columbia University preferred vendors list.

"We wanted to bring them [the workers] here to Columbia to give them [the students] some exposure," said Christina Chen, CC '09, political chair of the Asian American Alliance and the organizer of the event.

"People are not aware," she added, speaking of the students that have yet to find out about the debacle surrounding the restaurant, "but they want to help out."