Photo retailer B&H faces unwanted exposure over worker safety ( x-post from Labor Group)

[Sherman A1]

NEW YORK — At night, when Oscar Orellana arrives home after his 13-hour shifts in the warehouse of B&H Photo Video, a national electronics retailer, he is often in such pain, he can barely lift his 2-year-old daughter.

“He can’t bend at all,” said one of his older daughters, Odalys. “My sisters want to play hide and seek, or tag, but he can’t because his back is really injured.”

In 2014, Orellana fell from the top of an eight-foot-high pallet in the warehouse and severely injured his upper spine. He says he never received any training on how to operate the forklift he was instructed to use to unload the inventory. He was never even provided a hard hat, he says.

That’s why on Sunday, Orellana joined nearly 200 of his co-workers in publicly denouncing B&H Photo Video, the largest non-chain photo store in the United States, with more than a quarter of a billion dollars in annual revenue and a lengthy history of alleged discrimination and workplace safety complaints.

http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/10/bh-workers-claim-discrimination-unsafe-standards1.html?utm_content=main&utm_campaign=ajam&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow

[PSPS]

1. B&H has been around for a very long time.

It's a very interesting place and one that's fascinated me ever since the days of my youth when I would pour over their ads in the back of Modern Photography. As time went by and the Internet came to be, B&H expanded both their inventory and their sales model. Their website is very slick and has interesting videos about their business.

However, like just about every old business in New York, they are a real-life functioning stereotype, and they make very little effort to hide it in their website videos.