Two workers who spent the summer working at a North Pacific Seafoods, Inc. salmon processing plant in Alaska have sued the company with a litany of complaints, from poor living and working conditions to deceptive job posts and a lack of overtime pay.
The lawsuit was filed last month in federal court in Seattle, Washington, on behalf of workers Pedro Torres and Jorge Hurtado Jr. and others “similarly situated” after the two worked the 2020 summer salmon season at one of North Pacific’s five Alaska processing facilities.
The lawsuit accuses North Pacific of using false or deceptive advertising practices to attract workers to the processing plant, leveraging the mythology of exciting, adventurous work in “beautiful Alaska” but offering a grim reality.
“The free lodging [North Pacific Seafoods, Inc.] advertises is unsuitable for human occupancy. Rodents infest workers' beds and bathrooms. Mold blooms throughout its buildings. Bottled water is in short supply and tap water is contaminated, foul-smelling, and makes workers ill,” the lawsuit reads.
The class action complaint goes on the say that workers are required to put on rain gear, gloves, hairnets, earplugs, and other protective gear before clocking in and clocking out before removing the gear. Donning and doffing the gear takes around 15 minutes, and on top of that workers must be checked into the plant one-by-one, which they say takes another 10 minutes. These unpaid delays “deprive those at the bottom of the wage scale of hundreds of dollars a month.”
The lawsuit goes on to enumerate a long list of employee grievances, from a lack sufficient of protective gear like masks and metal-mesh fillet gloves to unsanitary workwear to unpaid overtime wages.
In July of this year, North Pacific was ordered to pay USD 500,000 (EU 420,000) to workers who were held in a Los Angeles, California, hotel for two weeks without pay as part of the coronavirus quarantine. Some 150 workers were on their way to work at North Pacific’s Red Salmon Cannery in Naknek, Alaska.
North Pacific hires about 800 workers every summer for their five processing plants around Alaska. Red Salmon is the largest of three plants that serve the sockeye salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska, and the company has plants in Sitka and Kodiak as well.
According to figures provided in the lawsuit, North Pacific controls 10 percent of the fisheries in Alaska, home to half of the world’s 10 largest fisheries by revenue.
Puerto Rican workers in 2017 described conditions in North Pacific’s Naknek plant as “subhuman” and characterized their work situation as “virtual slavery.” Their complaints prompted then-Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Russelló to send a letter to Bill Walker, who was governor of Alaska at the time.
According to the lawsuit, news of exploitation is nothing new to the Alaska officials.
“The Alaska government has long-recognized the problem of unscrupulous employers luring seasonal workers to the state with misleading promises of exciting work and high pay,” the lawsuit reads, adding that the Alaska Statutes have a unique law designed to curb fraud in bringing workers to the state.
