A group of highway service plaza workers and union organizers showed up to a Church Street office lobby with $1 million in “cash” as part of a holiday-season pressure campaign against alleged wage theft at Dunkin’ Donuts.
That was the scene at 195 Church St. Thursday afternoon at a protest led by Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
The union hosted the event to draw attention to an example of highway robbery, so to speak.
32BJ District Leader Neil Diaz and union spokesperson Franklin Soults said that an international fast food employer called Applegreen has defied state law by paying only $14 or $15 an hour instead of a prevailing wage of $18.21 an hour to 175 Dunkin’ Donuts workers at 23 plazas across Connecticut.
They said that the state Department of Labor requires state contractors like service plaza employers to pay their workers a prevailing wage that, for these Dunkin’ Donuts employees, should be roughly $4 above the current minimum wage.
“We’re here today to confront Applegreen,” Diaz said, “who is the leasing company that’s leasing the service plazas up on the state highways. … We want to give Applergreen a gift, which is a bag of a million dollars in play money, a million dollars that Applegreen has stolen from the workers in the past couple of years.”
Thus the rally and protest outside of 195 Church, where Applegreen’s regional CEO, Trevor Moore, purportedly has an office on the eighth floor.
No actual Dunkin’ Donuts service plaza...
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