Amy’s Kitchen Boycott

I am often quite skeptical of individuals choosing to boycott a company because they hear something bad about their labor practices. My question is simple: Are the workers asking for this? If they are, then great! If not, you are just making yourself feel righteous without doing anything. There was a case during the Amazon union vote in Alabama where some leftist made a big deal about boycotting Amazon–and the workers specifically had said they DID NOT want that because it would only hurt them with the other workers. But when the workers are demanding it, then that’s the solidarity tactic we absolutely must take.

Such it is with the organic frozen and processed food company Amy’s Kitchen. Those workers are organizing with the Teamsters and you can read about their effort here. Recently, they’ve called for a boycott.

Vegetarian dinners, burritos, and bowls from Amy’s Kitchen have been staples of plant-based freezers for decades. Recently, a group of Amy’s employees has come forward with allegations of lapses in workplace safety and low wages at the facilities that produce those packaged foods – and now some vegan organizations are calling on supporters to join a boycott of the brand.

In January, workers from the company’s Santa Rosa, California plant spoke with NBC News, claiming that line speeds in the factories increased in an attempt to meet pandemic demand. Those heightened speeds, they say, were linked to employees being injured on the job. Some of the workers say they were asked to work without accommodations for their injuries and have had difficulty affording expensive health insurance.

“There are a lot of days that I think that I’m good for nothing, that my life will never be the same and that I’ll never live without pain again,” Ines De La Cruz, a former employee at Amy’s, told NBC News.

De La Cruz told the network she injured her hand during a fast-paced shift and, when she returned to work wearing a brace prescribed by her doctor, supervisors told her to remove it. De La Cruz reports that, after the incident, she was reassigned to work disinfecting the plant’s cafeteria and that, months later, just as she was informed she would be a candidate for a surgery to address her arm injury, her job was eliminated entirely.

Amy’s Kitchen declined NBC requests to speak directly to the allegations, but denies that workers are mistreated. “It saddens us to hear that a few of our employees may be having a poor experience with us,” the company’s chief people officer, Mike Resch, wrote in a statement. “If an occupational or personal injury does occur, we are committed to finding safe, reasonable accommodation for everyone and do all that we can to make employees feel supported from the onset of injury or illness to and through recovery.”

Another worker at the Santa Rosa facility, Cecilia Luna Ojeda, filed a formal complaint with California’s workplace safety authority, Cal/OSHA, on behalf of herself and her colleagues, the North Bay Business Journal reported in late January. Employees at Amy’s Kitchen are not currently unionized but have been working with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to file the Cal/OSHA complaint and bring attention to their cause.

One important point about companies like this–they are still companies. Just because they make organic food and sell to a market of progressives does not mean they are good employers. In fact, they can be quite awful employers, no better than the giant meatpackers or other massive food corporations. If we care about sustainability in the food system, that absolutely must include a sustainable labor force that is treated with the respect we claim we want for the planet and for ourselves.

On an entirely different issue, that picture at the top, which is on the company’s Wikipedia page, is….rather unappetizing, no?