Employees at the iconic Boathouse Restaurant in Central Park have been secretly taping their bosses.
Fed up with their treatment by management, dozens of waiters and dishwashers have been reporting to work for the past year armed with miniature cassette recorders and have taped hundreds of workplace conversations, according to the New York Daily News.
"These tapes and transcripts provide irrefutable proof that the Boathouse Restaurant has repeatedly violated federal labor laws," said Peter Ward, president of Local 6 of the hotel and restaurant workers union.
Restaurant owner Dean Poll can be heard on several of the tapes warning his employees that if they vote for a union he "will go out of business."
A dozen workers claimed Thursday in interviews with the Daily News that supervisors routinely threatened and retaliated against them for trying to organize a union.
On Tuesday, Poll suddenly dismissed 16 workers - all supporters of the union campaign.
The restaurant normally employs about 100 people in the winter and up to 200 during the spring and summer.
"They told us we were terminated because they have a new policy of bringing in agency workers," said Francisco Labayen, a banquet waiter who regularly wore a wire to work.
Local 6 responded to those firings by formally petitioning for a union election Thursday to the National Labor Relations Board. Ward wants investigators from the federal agency to listen to the audiotapes for themselves and sanction Poll for a host of unfair labor practices.
The restaurant grosses more than $18 million annually. With it, Poll has a virtual monopoly on dining in the most famous park in America and also operates the boating and bicycle concession in the park.
He is a restaurant owner, however, with a history of labor problems.
Last year, he won a license from the Parks Department to take over the old Tavern on the Green restaurant, but the Bloomberg administration quickly revoked the license after Poll failed to reach a labor agreement with Local 6, which had represented the old Tavern on the Green workers. Ward now wants Donald Trump to take over Tavern on the Green.
A 2007 audit of the Boathouse operations by then-city Controller William Thompson found that Poll had underreported more than $2.3 million in revenues to the city over a two-year period.
During that time, the restaurant claimed more than $1.3 million in banquet tips as an expense, but could provide no proof that it actually passed those tips on to its employees.
In 1993, a U.S. appellate court ruled that Poll illegally fired a waiter at one of his Long Island restaurants after he overheard the worker complaining about the poor tips he was receiving.
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