Me and an old coworker at a “restaurant” (aka a glorified Subway) are discussing compiling a series of labor violations, worker mistreatment, and food safety violations across the time we were there and continuing. This goes from suppression of injury reports to cross contamination. We’ve contacted some old coworkers who have all now quit or been fired. I don’t know a single old employee who can speak well of their business model, so we have a lot to pull from.
First steps are contacting the labor and health departments to spur an inspection on the basis of an ant infestation (which they have, and is contaminating the food now) and then adding the other details we have, along with disability mistreatment/lack of accommodation, and injury report suppression. The goal is at least poor press after the inspection to decrease business and make them rethink how they handle things so that there are no other employees will have to go through what we did financially or mentally. We’ve had coworkers verbally harassed for having seizures, forced to work with ocular migraines, told they can’t wear injury aids because it’s a “contamination hazard”, etc. We want to begin warning current employees in the very real case the health department forces them to temporarily (or indefinitely) close, as many of the employees live paycheck to paycheck and a weeks’ loss of hours would decimate them. However, doing this could mean the owners find out about our plan and start to combat any trace of the evidence we have, making less concrete claims of mistreatment lose base. All three locations have video and audio surveillance which the owners (legally, unfortunately) use to watch employees pretty often.
How should we go about this?
US, Washington state, Thurston County area.