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FOOD RISKS TIED TO POOR WORK CONDITIONS
By ANTHONY RAMIREZ
The New York Times
April 6, 2006
Overworked, underpaid, poorly trained workers in New York City restaurants are more likely
to mishandle food, injure themselves and endanger customers, even to the point of bleeding
on food, according to a new report prepared by a workers' advocacy group.
The group, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, also told reporters yesterday
that restaurants that violate labor laws — by paying less than the minimum wage, for
example — were also more likely to be charged with health-code violations.
The center did not name the more than 500 city restaurants that employ the 880 employees
surveyed in its report.
Using data from city health inspections, the center found that 197 of the 500 restaurants had
been cited for violations like rusted food cans; improperly refrigerated food; live flies in the
restaurant; and cockroaches, vermin, cats and dogs present in kitchens and food-storage
areas.
The center acknowledged that its research was "not strictly random," unlike standard survey
research that requires 500 to several thousand respondents gathered by chance.
In the report, researchers used data from a 2003 survey of 530 restaurant workers and a
2005 survey of 350 workers.
The center said it sought out workers for interviews on "subways, in their neighborhoods, in
the vicinity of restaurants during breaks or at the end of shifts, and inside the restaurants
themselves." Many of the workers in the study did not want to be identified because they are
illegal immigrants.
Nonetheless, the center said the types of restaurants, workers and occupations reflected the
industry as a whole.
E. Charles Hunt, a spokesman for the Greater New York City Chapters of the New York State
Restaurant Association, said, "They're trying to make it look like every single restaurant in
the city is taking advantage of illegal immigrants." He said that most restaurants did no such
thing and that "food safety is the No. 1 priority of restaurant operators."
Mr. Hunt, who once owned a restaurant inWhite Plains, said the 880 workers cited in the
study did not represent the city's 250,000 restaurant workers. "Just no way are these valid
data," he said.
In the study, titled, "Dining Out, Dining Healthy," researchers for the Restaurant
Opportunities Center divided workers into a group that experienced "many labor violations"
at restaurants, such as the lack of overtime pay or sick leave, and a group that experienced
few such violations, based on their responses in interviews.
The center, for example, reported that 22 percent of the group with many violations reported
"sneezing, coughing or spitting on food," citing a lack of health and safety training, compared
with 14 percent for the group with few violations.
Cooks and dishwashers at a "small UpperWest Side restaurant" reported that when workers
cut themselves, they were ordered to put on gloves and continue working even when the
gloves filled with blood. The workers cited understaffing as the cause.
"The blood inevitably gets into the food that is served," one worker was quoted as saying.
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