California Employment Lawsuit Yields $15.3M Judgment for Workers

A group of 11 foreign workers alleging violation of California employment laws have won a $15.3 million judgment against the owners of a now-defunct bakery.

In May, U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin awarded the default judgment against defendants Analiza and Goncalo Moitinnho de Almeida, both Philippine nationals and the owners of L’Amande French Bakery.

The plaintiffs allege the Almeidas trafficked them from the Philippines to the U.S. to exploit them as bakery employees and domestic laborers, paying them below minimum wage and requiring them to work excessive hours without overtime pay.

The Almeidas operated two locations of L’Amande French Bakery, in Beverly Hills and Torrance. They closed both locations after this employee rights lawsuit was filed, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

The employee rights lawsuit alleges the Almeidas recruited the workers to emigrate to California in 2012, offering them promises of making twice as much money as they made at home in the Philippines.

The workers say they arrived in the U.S. under the E-2 visa program. This type of visa allows foreign nationals like the Almeidas to bring foreign workers with specialized skills over to the U.S. to work for a period of five years. The visa requires that the foreign investor has invested substantial capital in a U.S. business, and the workers’ must have specialized skills that are essential to that business.

The plaintiffs claimed that before the bakery even opened, the Almeidas had forced those workers who had already arrived to perform labor such as painting, cleaning and landscaping at their personal residence in Rolling Hills Estates and their 17-unit rental property in Long Beach.

Plaintiffs allege they were paid less than two dollars per hour for this work and were forced to sleep on the floor of the Almeidas’ laundry room.

Once the bakery opened, the workers allege, the defendants forced them to work 13-hour shifts, seven days per week. They say their wages at that time worked out to about 3 dollars per hour.

They claimed the defendants destroyed the workers’ time cards and ordered them not to accurately report their work hours. For this work, they say, they received below minimum wage and no overtime pay.

To keep the workers under their thumb, the Almeidas allegedly held over their heads the cost of their visa and travel expenses – purportedly $11,000 each, which the workers say was an artificially inflated figure that they could not possibly repay.

Enforcing California Employment Laws

The plaintiffs say that once the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement began investigation alleged violations of California employment laws at the bakery, the defendants ordered the workers to conceal evidence of violations.

They say the Almeidas ordered them to falsify responses on a DLSE questionnaire, threatening to fire them and force them to return to the Philippines if they did not comply. Workers who cooperated with the DLSE investigation were either written up or fired for pre-textual reasons, they say.

In 2014, the DLSE ordered the Almeidas to pay workers almost $250,000 in overtime pay required by California employment laws.

The employee rights lawsuit accuses the Almeidas of violation of California employment laws, human trafficking, and retaliation.

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