"L.A.’s kombucha empire exploited workers for years", 1 August 2023

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Dave’s kombucha factory treated workers terribly for years, according to a new ruling in a long-running lawsuit against his company, GT’s Living Foods...

...according to a ruling filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Dave’s kombucha company subjected a number of workers to “deplorable and abusive and disturbing working conditions” in one of its factories in Vernon, just south of downtown Los Angeles, between 2010 and 2014.

The judge in the case, William Highberger, found that the company hired workers without legal status, knowing that they could be “intimidated and abused,” that it required workers to clock 12- to 14-hour shifts without adequate breaks or overtime pay and that Dave himself, who testified in his own defense, “demonstrated a total absence of credibility” by contradicting himself in court...

Dave...said in a statement to The Times that he was “saddened” by the ruling. “Words such as ‘deplorable,’ ‘abusive’ and ‘disturbing working conditions’ are contrary to the standards I set for my Company since I began in 1995,” he wrote...

The ruling marks a milestone in a consolidated lawsuit that began a decade ago. In it, the court awarded more than $450,000 in restitution to 11 workers at one of Dave’s kombucha factories under California’s unfair competition laws, with some awarded nearly $59,000 in unpaid back wages...

The violations have affected thousands of employees in the last decade, the lawsuits allege...

In the earliest period covered by the suit, workers were expected to line up outside the doors 15 minutes before their shifts began between 4 and 6 a.m. and were terminated if they were late, according to the ruling...

Inside, the job required boiling tea, transporting large jugs of liquid and working without adequate breaks for more than 10 hours per day, according to the ruling. Some workers testified that their workday often stretched to 12 or 14 hours.

Every two weeks, the company would ask the workers — some of whom the court found to be illiterate — to sign a time sheet indicating that they worked eight-hour days and released the employer “for any future claims on this pay period.” Occasionally, workers would be paid in cash for their overtime work, but the court found the time sheets to be inadequate [and] the release to be illegal...

Rojas testified that the tea-brewing areas of the factory were so hot that workers’ sweat would fall into the tanks of brewing tea. He also said supervisors enforced strict control of breaks, when they were granted, rushing workers out of the bathroom if they took too long.

Another worker, Amancio Palacios, told The Times that after he sued the company in 2013, his supervisors used the temperature gradients of the plant to punish him. First, Palacios said, he would work in the tea-brewing area of the factory, where he would stack up buckets of brewing kombucha onto pallets, and would end up “drenched with sweat.” Then, he said, supervisors would send him to the refrigerated containers where finished products were kept. “My sweaty clothes would turn ice cold,” Palacios said.

Dave disputed both workers’ accounts, writing in a statement that cleanliness is “absolutely essential” in his company’s production facilities and that the brew vessels have lids to keep them protected from outside contaminants. He added that “no evidence of retaliation of any kind was ever proven.”

In court, Dave testified that he believed the case to be frivolous. “Unfortunately, in this current state of the world we live in,” Dave said, lawsuits “just happen if you have any smell of success around you. ... That is the cross that I bear.”...