B&H Faces Boycott Push Over Union Fight
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By Josh Nathan-Kazis July 19, 2017
A leftist activist group has called for a boycott against B&H Photo Video, the large Hasidic-owned New York City camera gear retailer, amid an ongoing labor dispute over the company’s plans to shutter two warehouses in Brooklyn.
The boycott call, announced Friday by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, comes after months of protests, including a day-long strike on May Day.
“B&H management will learn that the power of working people uniting across company and industry lines is a force to be reckoned with, ” said Zelig Stern, co-chair of the NYC-DSA Steering Committee, in a statement.
Workers at the B&H warehouses unionized in 2015. The federal government accused the company the next year of discriminating against Hispanic warehouse workers, and giving white workers access to “superior” bathrooms. B & H acknowledged in January that it would be closing the warehouses where the workers organized.
One of those warehouses is scheduled to close in August; the other sometime next year. B & H says that the leases on the warehouses is running out, and that the company had been planning to shutter them before the unionization effort began.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at nathankazis@forward.com or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
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