Unions and Central Park eateries are all over the news this week. Hot on the heels of Donald Trump's surprise announcement that he had come to an agreement with Local 6 of the hotel and restaurant workers union to operate Tavern on the Green (even though he has no lease there and the space is spoken for through October) comes the news that workers at the Boathouse restaurant (whose owner, Dean Poll, actually had the Tavern lease but was unable to come to a deal with Local 6) have secretly been taping their bosses' anti-union tirades.
The employees started taping their shifts with digital recorders last year to try and prove that the restaurant was violating federal labor laws. In them you can allegedly heard Dean Poll warning employees that if they vote for a union he "will go out of business."
On Tuesday, 16 workers—all supporters of the union campaign—were fired. Poll says the dismissals were unrelated to the union campaign, and that "this is the slow season. Those people weren't full-time employees anyway. I only need 14 full-time banquet waiters this time of year. If I need workers for a party, it's much easier to hire by outsourcing."
Local 6 has responded to the tapes by petitioning the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. "They treat us like animals in that place," Alejandra Betancourt, a banquet waiter who is still employed at the restaurant (or was until this morning?), told the News. "Many times, we work double shifts from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m., but they don't even give us decent meals to eat or proper work breaks, or pay us all our overtime."
Poll denies the allegations as "absolutely untrue" and says "the majority of the workers don't want a union."
