Earlier this month, around 7 p.m. on a Friday night, a dozen people in a busy Midtown restaurant stood up and started chanting: “No justice, no bread.” Management quickly escorted them out, where they joined another 12 or so people outside to continue the shouting and handing out flyers in support of their cause. Diners at the restaurant, sports bar Clyde Frazier’s, were left visibly confused in a video of the event.

The demonstration was just the latest effort taken in recent months by activist group Rise and Resist, which has been trying to take down a local bakery called Tom Cat. Last spring, Tom Cat Bakery — started in Queens in the ’80s and now owned by Yamazaki, the world’s largest bread-baking corporation — was the focus of a Department of Homeland Security I-9 audit, right at the height of the media frenzy over Trump’s stricter anti-immigration stances. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identified 21 immigrant employees who needed to verify their legal ability to work in the United States, and Tom Cat had to fire these employees. It kicked off a contentious, months-long standoff between employees and employer over protection rights and adequate severance — one that’s full of misinformation and that’s still going on today.

Caught in the crosshairs of this battle are restaurants like Le Bernardin, The Spotted Pig, and every Jean-Georges restaurant, who all used to carry Tom Cat and have been forced to become political by taking sides: Either they continue to purchase Tom Cat goods and are painted as anti-immigrant (from the perspective of Rise and Resist), or they drop the brand and immigrants who still work at the bakery could be penalized (from the perspective of Tom Cat bakery).

According to Rise and Resist and Brandworkers, the organization helping former Tom Cat employees organize, the workers are fighting for adequate severance from the bakery, as well as for the bakery to adopt a set of guidelines put forth by legal worker advocacy group National Employment Law Project about how to protect employees from ICE raids. The guide includes advice from immediately informing employees of an audit to the ins and outs of rights during an ICE workplace visit.

According to Tom Cat, the company already provided adequate severance, including one week of pay for each year of employment, health care for 90 days, full payout of unused sick, personal, and vacation days, and more. It was negotiated by the workers’ union — the local Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union — and accepted by 13 of the 21 affected employees. The he said-she said points are illustrated below:

The He Said-She Said of Tom Cat-Worker Negotiations

Contention point Tom Cat Bakery VP of national accounts says Brandworkers spokesperson says Contention point Tom Cat Bakery VP of national accounts says Brandworkers spokesperson says Timeline Tom Cat says it shared information with workers as soon as possible. "I can tell you that the audit was initiated under the previous federal administration, but that's about as much as I can tell you. We notified the affected employees as soon as we were told [in March] that 25 of them needed to update previously provided documentation in order to demonstrate right to work in the U.S." Brandworkers says Tom Cat hid information for two to three months, creating a scramble for affected workers. "The campaign stands where it does today largely in part because inexplicably, Tom Cat — instead of notifying workers when they first were informed about the audit — actually chose to hide the audit from the affected workers for approximately three months, then giving folks just 10 days to produce new documentation or lose their jobs." Negotiator Tom Cat says it worked with the workers' union to negotiate severance. "We worked with Local 53 to put a severance offer together that contained everything the union asked for." Brandworkers says the union did not advocate for workers' best interests. "The union has not had a significant role in this narrative mainly because unfortunately they did not act nor advocate in the interest of these workers, which is why workers chose to self-organize instead." Requested severance terms Tom Cat says it offered a best-in-class severance. "We offered and provided one week for each year of service, full pay for unused vacation and all unused personal and sick days, 90 days of continued health care benefits or their cash equivalent, and workers who demonstrated legal status within six months could return to work at the same job and same rate of pay." Brandworkers declines to say what would have been a fairer severance. "I'm certainly not going to negotiate numbers on workers' behalf in the press." NELP guidelines implementation Tom Cat says it hasn't heard from the organized workers since the firings. "Actually no one has directly engaged with us about that. They've been speaking to the press, they've been handing things out. But none of the employees or activist groups have engaged with us directly on those guidelines. Our attorneys have told us those guidelines have not been vetted by DHS. Until they've been vetted by DHS and approved as policies that would actually make sense, we're not going to move forward on adopting policies that we're not sure are legal." Brandworkers says it has repeatedly tried to reopen dialogue with Tom Cat, even meeting in person with its parent company Yamazaki. "Workers would like to continue negotiations with Tom Cat and have ceaselessly extended the invitation to continue. To this day, Tom Cat refuses to engage in the continuation of that dialogue. What workers are campaigning for is the implementation of some basic protection policies. They're things as simple as ask for a warrant before letting agents in the factories and a policy of audit notification." Workers who accepted Tom Cat says a majority of workers accepted the severance, with one even returning to work. "Thirteen of 21 accepted the offer, and one has returned to work after providing required documentation." Brandworkers says those who accepted were coerced into doing so. "These are generally lower-wage workers with families, with rent, with everything that everyone has, and quite suddenly they are faced with the loss of their income — with pretty much no time to prepare. Unfortunately in lieu of extreme economic hardship that people were facing at this time, plus what we perceive to be likely intimidation methods of sorts used on workers at the factory, yeah, some people had to take the deal."

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, an area in which NYC restaurants are caught, with seemingly no end in sight. So far, Le Bernardin, all the Jean-Georges restaurants, The Spotted Pig, and Murray’s Cheese Bar have dropped Tom Cat as a client since the spring. It’s another he said-she-said point of contention: Brandworkers insists the loss in business was a direct consequence of the ICE-related firings, while Tom Cat insinuates other reasons for the dropped clients. Le Bernardin and The Spotted Pig declined to comment; Jean-Georges has not returned Eater’s repeated requests for comment; and Murray’s confirms that it has indeed dropped Tom Cat, but did so months before the firings simply because it switched to a different product.

This direct targeting of restaurants is only continuing. Rise and Resist says that Chelsea Spanish restaurants El Quinto Pino and Txikito, both of which carry Tom Cat bread, are its “next target”; the group has already started hanging flyers about the situation near the restaurant. Chef-owner Alex Raij tells Eater in an email she is “looking into the issue, as well as other bread companies (including Hot Bread Kitchen and Caputo’s, both current purveyors of ours).”

But others — like the Park Slope Food Coop and Ark Restaurant Group, which owns Clyde Frazier’s, Bryant Park Grill, Robert, and El Rio Grande here in NY — are keeping Tom Cat as their bread purveyor. Ark is even going so far as to vehemently speak out in support of the bakery. (Park Slope Food Coop has not returned Eater’s request for comment.)

“If they thought that the reason they are doing this is to cause me to lose business and therefore succumb and not use Tom Cat ... Look, I’m a healthy-enough corporation that if I lost a lot of business, I’m still going to be in business. So I’m not going to cave to this. I’m embarrassed that other restaurateurs are caving,” Ark Restaurant Group president Michael Weinstein says. By his logic, if he loses business at his restaurants, he’d have to reduce employees’ hours, and 60 percent of his workers are born outside of the U.S. — so Rise and Resist would in the end simply “hurt the pocketbooks of the same people they want to support,” he says.

Brandworkers unsuccessfully calls on Robert, an Ark restaurant, to boycott Tom Cat

Tom Cat and its workers’ union both made similar points about Rise and Resist’s efforts being focused in the wrong places. “I think it’s important to stand up for immigrant workers’ rights,” Tom Cat VP of national accounts Peter Sonenstein says. “You just need to target your activities to the people who can make changes, which is not Tom Cat Bakery. We can’t change the immigration law.”

Changing immigration law is obviously an incredibly ambitious endeavor, and so for now, Brandworkers and Rise and Resist are focusing, they say, not on hurting anyone’s “pocketbooks,” but on getting restaurants to adopt the NELP guidelines to help protect worker rights.

“I’m trying to get him [Weinstein] and businesses everywhere to understand that they don’t have to be complicit in the Trump administration’s agenda,” a Rise and Resist spokesperson says. “The [NELP] best practices are simple and a small ask and go a long way in giving the business community a way to say thank you to the immigrant employees who have given them loyal service for decades and stand up to the immigrant-hating agenda by the Trump administration.”

The NELP guidelines may be more and more necessary for restaurants, commonly subject to ICE raids, looking to protect employees and themselves. ICE deputy director Tom Homan said at a press conference in December that the unit plans a 400 percent increase in raids. “We’re not just talking about arresting the aliens at these work sites; we are also talking about employers who knowingly hire people who are unauthorized to work,” he said.

But Tom Cat’s Sonenstein questions the legality of the guidelines. ICE declined to specifically comment on the guidelines. NELP staff attorney Laura Huizar says that the lawyers who created them worked together with the National Immigration Law Center and consulted experts on civil rights and workplace rights, basing the recommendations on “very basic Fourth Amendment rights” and “resources the federal government has already made public.”

In the meantime, Tom Cat continues with business as usual while Brandworkers and direct action groups carry on with resistance plans. Both remain on complete opposite ends of the spectrum, and so restaurants are pressured to pick sides.

Brandworkers says: “Tom Cat Bakery should be a leader in this effort.”

Tom Cat says: “We’ve been pretty clear about the fact that we’ve done everything we can for our employees.”

Eater NY Sign up for our newsletter. Email (required) By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy. Subscribe Your subscription has been confirmed. You've been added to our list and will hear from us soon. {{error_msg}}