Fuck You Tate and Your Union-Busting Bake Shop

The assholes who run Tate’s Bake Shop, the Hamptons-based cookie brand that corporate giant Mondelez International bought for half-a-billion dollars in 2018, have apparently been doing some low-down, dirty union-busting.

As journalist Caroline Lewis reported for Gothamist on Thursday, Tate’s workers say that management has brought in an anti-union labor consultant whose whole job seems to be scaring them away from organizing further.

The consultant, according to Anthony Miranti—a delegate from the Eastern States Joint Board of the International Union of Allied, Novelty, and Production Workers speaking on behalf of the workers—told the mostly undocumented workforce of about 450 that if they unionized, the union would have to review their documentation. If everything wasn’t in order, they were told they’d be “sent back,” i.e., deported.

This is simply not true, Miranti said. “We’ve assured them and given them literature right off the website of the federal government showing this is not the case,” he explained.

Undocumented workers have the same rights to organize as anyone else under the National Labor Relations Act, as Lewis noted, so it’s pretty clear that this was just a scare tactic deployed by Tate’s management to protect the company’s bottom line at the risk of its workers—who weathered the past year of the covid-19 pandemic without any clear understanding from above what their rights were as workers during such an unprecedented event.

“We were in the heart of the pandemic at that time and they didn’t know any of the rules that applied to them,” Miranti told Lewis. “Will they get paid if they have to self-quarantine? How do they get safety equipment? They were telling us about how they’re all at minimum wage and needed more paid time off and there was just nobody to listen to their problems.”