Master Food Employees Join Local 338 (12/8/11)

Workers at Master Food, a supermarket store in Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York, have joined RWDSU Local 338 and ratified a new contract that drastically improves wages and benefits. The successful organizing campaign comes in the wake of a lawsuit settlement that will see the Master Food workers receive $300,000 as a result of stolen wages.

The lawsuit and organizing campaign resulted from a partnership between Local 338 and New York Communities for Change, a community group that is fighting wage theft in New York. While New York Communities for Change was working primarily on the lawsuit, the union was working to organize the workers to provide them with long-term security once the lawsuit was settled.

Now, workers who were once overworked and paid illegal wages – as little as $3.93 an hour without required overtime pay with 12 hour days – will receive a minimum of $7.60 an hour with guaranteed pay raises, vacation, holiday, sick, personal and funeral days.

For workers at the store like Pedro Galicia Postrero, the difference is like night and day.

"They paid me very little. I barely had enough to pay for rent, for food, for electricity. I just didn't have money for anything,” Postrero said.
“Now, things are different, thank God. I'm very happy with what we won,” Postrero added.