A Freak situation
In response to the article “Labour concerns at Freak Lunchbox,” it is apparent that we need to tell our side (City story by Jacob Boon, December 20). This business has supported many families over the past 18 years; five of our six current managers are raising or expecting children. Of course we could not have made it this far without the contributions of our team, and we are extremely grateful for the hundreds of employees we have had over the years. As business owners we must sometimes make difficult decisions in the interest of our business and the people who work for us.
We take serious labour concerns to heart and act swiftly when we are in error. We are not perfect, we have made many mistakes along the road, but in this case there were no actual valid infractions. We do not feel this was a newsworthy event but is simply about an employee who disagreed with their termination and continues to seek justification for it.
The staff member who was let go was a
part-time/casual employee who we regularly accommodated with long-term personal leaves from her position. Prior to being relieved of her duty she had received a written warning for drinking alcohol on work premises, despite a no-alcohol policy implemented, outlined and signed in the terms of her employment agreement. The Coast was made aware of this warning but chose to omit this from publication. (Editor’s note: During reporting, Smith mentioned the alcohol incident but only after asking for it to be off the record, and that it not be published in the original article.)
Although all of our stores have managers, as owners we are in the flagship store on a daily basis. Not once did she approach us personally to discuss anything that was of concern to her despite her frequent interactions with us.
The decision to let this individual go with severance and no hard feelings was based on her morale issues and the negative work environment she had contributed to. In no way was it based on any legitimate labour board concerns. One of her “labour concerns” was a request for anti-fatigue mats for a job that specifically requires you to not stand still, and to be out on the floor interacting with customers or maintaining product freshness. (The advice from the inspector was for our staff to get better shoes.)
To compare our actions with those of the Smiling Goat is downright offensive. We pay our staff on time and well. (The employees mentioned in the article were both being paid well above minimum wage.) We at Freak Lunchbox aim to provide a clean, enjoyable work environment. We have store managers who are available to the employees and regularly review and provide feedback on performance. They work in a candy store surrounded by our personal details, hand-painted artwork, happy customers and general pride of ownership that has propelled us from a small two-person company to a small 40+ person company.
We feel the retention rate of our staff in this industry is exceptional, and the happy ex-employees far outweigh those who feel they were wrongfully dismissed. It is important for employees to have a voice when they are wronged, but we stand behind our decision in this case.
—Erin Schwanz and Jeremy Smith, Freak Lunchbox
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2019.
An Open Letter to Jeremy Smith and Erin Schwanz
Jeremy and Erin,
We are writing today as a group of former Freak Lunchbox employees. We must challenge your assertion, quoted in The Coast’s December 20th article, again in your subsequent letter to the editor, and in conversations with staff over the last three years, that Freak Lunchbox is a good place to work.
As employers, it is not up to you to determine what is or is not a good place to work. You reference your compliance with Labour Standards minimums, but that is woefully insuffient. Further, it is not even true. You do violate Labour Standards minimums, for example, by forbidding workers from calling in sick if they do not find a replacement, and by constructively dismissing workers who fall out of favor by massively cutting their hours.
Further, you have shown outright hostility to any suggestion of providing any more than the minimum, even for things that are industry standard across retail environments. While paid 15 minute breaks, anti-fatigue mats, anti-slip mats for outside, and the opportunity to purchase warm uniform sweaters are not set out in (Nova Scotia’s woefully inadequate) labour law, they are provided widely across the retail sector. What is more, you have regularly weaponized, this is good job or, you have it better here than other places, to shut down workers’ complaints, whether raised collectively or individually.
You play the card of being a small family-run business or a corporation depending on what is most advantageous to you at the present moment. When we asked for 15 minute breaks and provided examples of companies that provide them (including Wendy’s, Superstore, and Walmart), we were told that, as a small business, you could not afford to. Yet, when we asked for a meeting with you, you replied that you [weren’t] running a candy store, [you were] running a corporation. This is in spite of your employee handbook stating that Freak Lunchbox is a small family-run business that values a continuous two-way flow of communication.
In your responses, you have singled out one individual and slandered her character. As an employer, this is incredibly inappropriate, immature and unprofessional the very things that you accused us of when all we asked was to meet with you collectively. You have consistently tried to paint our collective action as that of one disgruntled employee. This is both untrue and insulting to the work we put in, listening to each other’s concerns, planning, and writing collectively to express our needs as workers. We know that it is less threatening to think that one person is challenging the status quo, and we know that you know the power that workers have when we stand together. That is why you reacted to our collective action with individual meetings and firings.
You reference the retention rate of your employees, yet over the last two years the staff at the downtown location has completely turned over nearly three times. When a worker responsible for the majority of the training of new employees brought up the toll that this turnover had had on their well-being, they were told that you had said that you like[d] the turnover because it keeps things fresh.
Further, by framing the issue in terms of retention, you obscure the circumstances of the employees who leave or are pushed out. You cover up the long-time workers whose hours were cut until they quit. You leave out the worker who, when contacted about speaking with The Coast, said that she was afraid you would ruin her life and imperil her current and future employment. You ignore the worker who quit because she felt unable to work for employers who punish individuals for collective action. You conveniently fail to mention the worker you fired on Christmas Eve.
Finally, you say that the employee in question did not bring her concerns up to you individually beforehand. This is both untrue and ignores the power that you held as employers over our lives. We had been asking for anti-slip mats for two years, sweaters for one year, and paid 15 minute breaks for a number of months. All of these had been brought up individually to our manager, in the communication binder, and collectively in staff meetings. By the time we requested a meeting with you, we felt that we had exhausted what we could achieve with the channels that had been set out for us. What is more, workers have the right to make collective representation to their bosses because of the inherent power imbalance between bosses and workers. That you refused to even meet with us, but pulled us aside individually to intimidate and/or fire us shows that we were right in planning to bring up our concerns as a group.
We were not asking for much, and everything we did ask for was framed in the language of maximizing your profits, improving morale, and maintaining the amazing customer experience that Freak Lunchbox is known for. You called us entitled, but demanded our genuine love of the job as a condition of employment, as if we are not forced by this economic system to sell our labour in order to survive.
Your side of this story has been told. Both your side individually as the owners of Freak Lunchbox, and the side of business owners broadly. You profit from your image as a desirable place to work, a quirky local business with Disney-character employees who love their jobs. Our side the side of workers, who individually hold little power in the employer-employee relationship is rarely told. But we will not be silent anymore.
-Several former employees, with support from the Industrial Workers of the World
“During the meeting with her, she confessed that the social group she had created at Freak Lunchbox was incredibly tight and they spent many hours together after work. We felt this social group was becoming increasingly unaware of the boundary between their work and social environments.”
This quote is from the version of this letter you posted as a comment on the December 20th article. Seems you didn’t add it this time, eh? Likely a smart move, as you don’t get to dictate what your employees do or with whom outside of work. That’s super fucked up.