In California, biomaterials company Landec Corporation, and food subsidiary, Apio Inc., reached an agreement to settle claims. There were two attempts to unionize Apio’s processing plant in Guadalupe, California, which were unsuccessful. A union and over 100 employees of Apio’s labor contractors brought many legal actions and arbitrations against Apio, which used Pacific Harvest as a contract labor provider for over 15 years. The three main claims were unfair labor practices, discrimination/wrongful termination, and wage and hour claims. Apio agreed to a class action settlement for non-exempt employees of Pacific Harvest that work at the Guadalupe facility.
Landec’s COO, Ron Midyett told NASDAQ’s GlobeNewswire, “We are very pleased that these legal actions are now behind us and that we are able to settle these Actions as a class rather than having to arbitrate over 100 cases individually which could have taken several years. To prevent Apio from being subjected to such litigation in the future, Apio has taken over all of the responsibilities of human resources for the plant employees and has established a new set of more stringent policies and procedures including monitoring payroll processing on a weekly basis.”