“No one was ever fired for protesting,” said Ronnie Dragoon, the owner of the restaurant chain Ben’s Kosher Deli, after three employees at its Greenvale location were terminated days after participating in the nationwide Day Without Immigrants protest on Feb. 16.
A denial of the direct role of the protest in the terminations was repeated by Vanessa Bishop, an account executive with the firm Public Relations and Marketing Group that represents Ben’s Kosher Deli, and by the company’s Facebook page.
But subsequent interviews with Dragoon, the restaurant’s general manager Luis Flores and two of the fired employees raised doubts about the assertion.
In an interview last Friday, Dragoon said he terminated one of the employees for physically threatening coworkers unwilling to participate in the protest.
The worker, whose name Blank Slate Media has chosen to withhold due to his immigration status, denied the allegation.
“It’s completely not true,” he said. “I said [to the other employees] if you want to work, you can work.”
“My mistake is I started talking,” the worker said. “I said listen we’re all Spanish. Most people here are in the same situation. Ronnie really needs Spanish people here. Maybe in the future he can do something for us. We want to let him know we are important in this place.”
The worker said he is from Honduras.
Dragoon said two workers told him the terminated employee had threatened them, and that the terminated employee threatened Flores after his firing on the morning of Feb. 17.
Flores said he felt sufficiently threatened to call the police and file a report that morning.
The fired employee denied that he had threatened Flores.
The other two employees were fired because their seasonal tenure with the company was nearing its end, Dragoon said.
But he also said the company had not yet found replacements for the workers and that he was unsure of exactly when they planned to leave the restaurant for seasonal landscaping jobs.
Blank Slate Media has also chosen to withhold the names of those two employees due to their immigration status. One of the workers is from Honduras and the other is from El Salvador.
When presented with an interpretation of the events that suggested the workers were terminated earlier than they would have been had they not participated in the protest, Dragoon said, “One can argue that. I won’t dispute that. I think if I had to do it over again, I would think twice about it. Even though I knew they only had two to three weeks.”
“If I got out of the hour, the moment and could take a step back, I probably wouldn’t have done that,” he added. “There were multiple things going on.”
Earlier in the interview he said he was not sure how long their seasonal tenure with the restaurant would last.
Contradicting Dragoon, Flores said he already was planning to fire the two seasonal employees prior to the protest.
“I don’t know if Ronnie was, but I had,” he said.
He said one of the workers had a drinking problem and the other wasn’t fully concentrating during his shifts.
In all, 21 of the 43 employees at the Greenvale restaurant and deli chose not to work on account of the protest.
As of last Friday, nine of the workers had returned to their jobs at Ben’s Kosher Deli.
The deli sent a letter last week to all outstanding employees saying they could resume their jobs without penalty. They can respond as late as March 1, at which time Dragoon will begin hiring full-time replacements, he said.
Dragoon said he was willing to invite back the terminated employees, though the one accused of threatening coworkers could not return to the Greenvale location.
