Suit Charges ‘Sweat Equity’ Restaurant Plan Was a Hoax
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A workers rights group that claimed to help laborers put out of work by the September 11, 2001 attacks open an employee-owned restaurant betrayed the very people it was supposed to represent, a lawsuit filed by former employees charged yesterday.
The group, the Restaurant Opportunities Center NY, said it would help workers from Windows on the World, a restaurant destroyed when the twin towers collapsed, found a restaurant called Colors in Greenwich Village, according to the lawsuit. The eatery was to be owned and operated by the workers themselves, the suit claims.
Colors and its novel business model were greeted with much fanfare in December 2005, with newspaper articles cheering the restaurant as a testament to worker empowerment.
But according to eight of the workers, that ideal was an illusion and they are suing the advocacy group in State Supreme Court in Manhattan for allegedly expelling most of the original employees and reneging on the ownership rights promised them.
“ROC-NY has perpetrated a hoax on the labor movement and on progressive-minded people in New York,” one of the plaintiffs, Orlando Godoy, said in a statement.
The executive director of Restaurant Opportunities Center NY, Saru Jayaraman, did not return several messages left on her cell phone.
According to the lawsuit, the 35 original employees of the restaurant were promised ownership as long as they worked hours of “sweat equity” without pay. So the workers say they were shocked when, eight months prior to the opening, the advocacy group allegedly released a plan under which the workers would own only 20% of the restaurant and wouldn’t even be entitled to that share for another five years, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Arthur Schwartz, said. The workers had been told they would own 100% of the business, he charged.
Until the end of the five-year period, the lawsuit alleges, the restaurant would be split 50-50 between Restaurant Opportunities Center and a group of Italian investors that had put $1 million into the project. When some of the workers protested, they were fired, the suit alleges.
“They’re hypocrites,” Mr. Schwartz said of the Restaurant Opportunities Center.
Colors, on Astor Place, is still in operation and run by Restaurant Opportunities.
