B&H Photo Video - Wikipedia
The business owner, Herman Schreiber, and many of the store's employees are observant Satmar Hasidic Jews. The store is closed on Shabbat, most Jewish holidays (except for Hanukkah, when business dealings are permitted), and Christmas. Although the web site remains open, e-commerce orders are not taken or shipped between Friday evening and Saturday evening, or on Jewish holidays.[2][3]
The brick and mortar store employs hundreds of Orthodox Jews. An Orthodox Jewish bus company provides daily service to and from Kiryas Joel, a Satmar village in Orange County, New York, as well as Brooklyn and Queens.[4]
In October 2007, it was announced that B&H Photo agreed to pay US$4.3 million to settle allegations that it discriminated against Hispanic workers.[18]
In November 2009, a lawsuit against B&H Photo alleged that the store refused to hire women, in violation of New York City and New York State Human Rights Laws.[19]The lawsuit, brought by four women, sought class action status on behalf of all women discriminated against by B&H over the course of many years.[20] Given B&H's prior alleged discriminatory practices,[18] the lawsuit sought US$19 million in compensatory and punitive damages in order to deter future discriminatory practices.[21]
In 2011, a lawsuit alleged discrimination against Hispanic workers.[22][23]
In February 2016 the United States Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against B&H alleging that the company had only hired Hispanic men into entry-level jobs in a Brooklyn warehouse and then subjecting them to harassment and unsanitary conditions.[24]
----------------
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/...d-for-discrimination-of-hispanic-workers.html
B&H Electronics Store Sued for Discrimination of Hispanic Workers
By PATRICK McGEEHANFEB. 26, 2016
A B&H warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where only Hispanic men were hired as entry-level laborers, a lawsuit says. Yeong Ung Yang for The New York Times
For the second time in nine years, the owners of B&H Photo Video, a popular electronics store in Manhattan, have been sued by the federal government for discriminating against Hispanic workers.
On Wednesday, the federal Labor Department announced that it had filed suit against B&H for hiring only Hispanic men into entry-level jobs in a Brooklyn warehouse and then subjecting them to harassment and unsanitary conditions. The company was so unlikely to hire women to work in the warehouse that it did not have a separate restroom for them, according to the suit.
B&H, a family-owned business that started in the financial district in 1973 and moved to Midtown in 1997, has a history of labor disputes. Its name derives from the initials of its founders, Herman Schreiber and his wife, Blimie.
Until 2012, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had been monitoring the company’s hiring and compensation practices as a result of an earlier discrimination suit. The company settled that suit in 2009 by agreeing to pay $4.3 million to 149 employees who were paid less, withheld from promotions or denied benefits because they were Hispanic.
This week, workers in the warehouse beneath the company’s flagship store on Ninth Avenue voted to join the United Steelworkers union, despite what their representatives said was a concerted effort by management to block the organizers. On the same day, B&H fired a seven-member cleaning staff that had complained about hostile treatment, said Rosanna Aran, co-director of Laundry Workers Center United, which led the organizing campaign.
In November, employees in two of the company’s warehouses in Brooklyn voted to join the steelworkers union. The union is in negotiations with B&H on a labor contract, Ms. Aran said.
“Things are getting better” for the workers, she said. “It’s not that everything is good right now, but things are moving forward.”
A spokesman for B&H, Henry Posner, declined to respond to questions about the lawsuit or the union matters, citing the continuing litigation.
The latest federal complaint arose from a standard review of the employment practices of companies with federal contracts. B&H has supply contracts with the General Services Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that are worth $46 million.
Those contracts could be canceled and B&H could be prohibited from receiving other federal contracts if an administrative law judge decides the company has failed to meet its obligations, said Edmund Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the Labor Department. The suit was filed by the department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
The department contends that over a two-year period starting in January 2011, B&H hired 101 entry-level laborers at its warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. All of them were Hispanic men. None of the employees at the warehouse was a woman, the suit says.
During the same time, at other levels in the warehouse, the company paid white workers more and promoted them faster than their Hispanic counterparts, the suit contends. Supervisors and other workers subjected Hispanic employees to verbal abuse, including “racist remarks and excessive yelling,” it says.
The Hispanic workers had to use “unsanitary and often inoperable restrooms” that were separate from better facilities available to their white co-workers, the suit says.
In a letter sent last year to Sam Goldstein, the chief executive of B&H, a Labor Department official recounted the unsuccessful efforts to reach a settlement with the company to avert a lawsuit. Lawyers for B&H offered $112,000 in what they called a “take-it-or-leave-it good faith offer.”
The department left it.
----------------
US Labor Department sues B&H Foto & Electronics Corp. for hiring, pay, promotion discrimination; harassment
I get all my audio and video equipment off Ebay, Craigslist or directly from the manufacturer. Places like B&H are just the plug jacking up prices to earn their cut. With that said fukk em
had me thinning this involved blacks, fukk those Mexicans
