On Tuesday, May 12, 2020, customers will push their shopping cart out of the Stew Leonard supermarket in Paramus, NJ, USA. StewLeonard Jr. said the meat stuffing plant used by the company is operating at about 70% capacity, and CT Post reported that it had rebounded to full capacity in about a month.
Angus Mordant | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The new federal lawsuit accuses the CEO of Stew Leonard’s grocery store chain, based in the New York metropolitan area, for making racist and sexist comments about workers and customers. ..
Former longtime employee Robert Crosby Jr. also claims With his citizen’s complaint After becoming disabled in a match against Covid-19, he quit his job in violation of Americans with Disabilities Act.
Crosby, the father of four 58-year-olds, accuses Stew Leonard and CEO Stew Leonard Jr. of creating a hostile work environment. The proceedings cite “systematic racial, sexual, religious and age-discriminatory practices” carried out by management.
Crosby is seeking damages of at least $ 500,000 in a proceeding filed in the US District Court in Southern New York this week.
The proceedings are in contrast to the farm folk image of the grocery chain, which was once praised by President Ronald Reagan and business leader Tom Peters. The first Stew Leonard’s opened in 1969 as a small dairy store in Norwalk, Connecticut. Featuring a small petting zoo, a farm-themed food display, and animatronic singing animals, the store has exploded in size, popularity, and publicity over the next few decades.
The family-owned company currently has annual revenues of approximately $ 400 million in seven locations in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
Leonard Jr. declined to comment on the allegations in Crosby’s proceedings.
“Robert Crosby Jr. worked for Stu Leonardo for almost 20 years, but unfortunately we had to say goodbye,” Leonard Jr. said in a statement submitted to CNBC on Tuesday. Stated. “I understand that he has filed a proceeding and will consider it with a lawyer, but will not comment on the proceedings in dispute.”
Former loss prevention manager Crosby said the proceedings “verbally opposed” allegations of slur and practices in employment.
The proceedings also alleged that Leonard Jr. joked a few years ago about the discovery of human remains and tombstones in an abandoned Orthodox Jewish cemetery on and near the premises of a Yonkers store in New York. There is. According to the lawsuit, the workers were ordered to bury the tombstone, and the store’s president, Leonard Jr.’s cousin, said, “No one could find the tombstone.”
Crosby’s proceedings claim that he and his colleagues have been “exposed to a hostile and toxic work environment” since he began working at the Yonkers site in 2001.
In the lawsuit, Leonard Jr. repeatedly called the woman “b —– s”, two white Jewish employees his “resident Jewish”, and regularly black employees “evil”. About the body part of a black employee who claims to have commented, calling it “criminal” N-word. Crosby’s proceedings also said he witnessed Leonard Jr. repeatedly saying that the Jews were “the worst customers to deal with.”
The lawsuit also states that Leonard Jr. “upper wears sexually suggestive and inappropriate clothing, including fake breasts, lingerie and sex toys, and presents sexually suggestive and offensive skits. Insisted “explaining the company’s Christmas party in the early 2000s.
Crosby claims that Leonard Jr. has made several complaints about the alleged practice with the company’s HR manager. He told him in her proceeding that “the stew is just a stew” and “he doesn’t have a filter”.
Covid Fight
According to Crosby’s lawsuit, when the coronavirus began to spread in the United States in March 2020, Crosby had no personal protective equipment in the store, no social distance, and labor in the field to wear protective masks. He complained about the prohibition of the person. Those complaints were deaf, the proceedings said.
Crosby’s proceedings state that he signed with Covid in April 2020 after 50 colleagues tested positive last month. He states that he develops “extremely life-threatening” symptoms, including “loss of smell and taste, nausea, brain fog, Epsteiner’s syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome” and memory loss. He added that this required hospitalization, the proceedings added.
Stu Leonard Jr.
Adam Jeffrey | CNBC
The proceedings state that he developed a “long-distance covid” and was pressured to return to work after being reluctantly given medical leave. ((((Long Covid Patients experience symptoms for several months after infection. ) During the subsequent six days of hospitalization for Covid’s complications in September 2020, Crosby was ordered by the vice president of the Yonkers store to “work in his hospital bed.”
Crosby said he was fired later in the month after Stew Leonard refused to give him a short vacation from work so he could recover from Covid, according to the proceedings.
Crosby filed a proceeding after receiving a notice of probable cause issued by the New York State Human Rights Authority in response to the alleged discrimination filed against Stulenard in 2021.
According to the notice, the department determined that there was reason to believe that Stew Leonard’s and Leonard Jr. engaged in illegal discriminatory practices. Crosby also showed that Leonard claimed that he was “free to use the word” N “many times.” In March, the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a notice to Crosby of his right to sue Stullenard after Crosby filed an EEOC complaint against his former employer.
Cemetery controversy
Crosby also described in his proceedings the discovery of a tombstone in a leased land occupied by Stew Leonard’s in Yonkers from May 2004 to 2009.
Crosby claims that company executives have instructed him and his colleagues to bury the tombstone “in a place where no one can find it.” He also claims that he was told he would lose his job if someone knew it.
According to the proceedings, in 2009 Crosby and other workers found human bones during a fire investigation. They were told to “get a bag of coffee burlap and throw away the bones of the trash,” the proceedings say.
“Defendant Leonard Jr. jokingly referred to the discovery of human remains and tombstones, which were determined to be the remains of an Orthodox Jewish cemetery, as the” Yonkers Holocaust, “” the proceedings allege.
Crosby’s proceedings allege that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorders and other illnesses after his boss threatened to dismiss him if he talked to others about bones.
Crosby’s allegations broke in 2004, when the Attorney General of New York’s office claimed that New Jersey developers may not have followed a 1989 court order to arrange the transfer of all bodies from the graveyard. May shed new light on the story when they developed the Yonkers site, which came to house Stew Leonard’s and two other stores, Costco and Home Depot. According to media reports at the time, the body was re-detained in Israel.
According to a published report, two tombstones were found abandoned near Stew Leonard in 2004 following these allegations.
Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, claimed that the bodies of up to 135 children remained. It may have been left behind during the demolition project. 2005 Developer Morris Industrial Builders Agreed to resolve the case Together with Spitzer, he built a monument near the former cemetery and donated the $ 100,000 settlement left over after the monument was built to a nonprofit organization.
At the time, Morris Industrial lawyers claimed that “inappropriate behavior or improper conduct” was not found and all bodies in the graveyard were backfilled, according to a 2005 Associated Press article on the case. I did. “
The image of Stew Leonard’s chain was hit earlier in 1993 when Stew Leonard Sr. pleaded guilty to a federal crime. $ 17.1 million tax evasion scheme It included sucking up the store’s cash receipts into his private vault. Elder Leonard was sentenced to more than four years in prison in this case and was also convicted by his wife’s two brothers, who were the store’s top executives at the time.
Court records from a case filed by a federal prosecutor Leonard Jr. indicates that his father and uncle have been exempted as part of a conviction transaction and that Leonard Jr. has participated in a cash skimming plot that resulted in a tax claim.
