B&H Photo Settles Sex, Race Discrimination Suit For $3.2M
B&H Photo Video, the Jewish-owned Manhattan electronics retail giant, is settling a sex and race discrimination lawsuit filed by workers at its Brooklyn warehouse for $3.2 million.
“We are pleased that B&H entered into this agreement, and has committed to ensuring that their workers will receive equitable wages and opportunities, and enjoy a workplace that promotes equal employment opportunity,” labor mediator Jeffrey Rogoff said, according to the news website DNAInfo.
The suit, which was entered into by more than 1,300 workers, alleged that B&H only hired Hispanic men for entry-level jobs at the warehouse and cheated them out of wages.
Compensation will be distributed to those workers for back-pay and other damages. The company will also hire an independent monitor for its employment practice.
B&H says it settled merely to avoid costly courthouse expenses. “We settled to avoid the distraction of litigation,” a company spokesman told DNAInfo. “As a government contractor, we determined settlement was in our best interest”
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO