“I realize removing the signs that express support for the basic human rights of our black and LGBTQ employees, and customers was not in that spirit of supporting your feelings, along with a longer-term lapse in communications as we’ve gone through growing pains,” he wrote. In an internal letter to Fleishers employees on August 2, Rosania apologized for removing the signs. The company is now struggling to hire back staff without an employee overseeing its human resources department - they resigned following the incident - amid a nationwide hiring shortage.Ī sign posted to the front door of the company’s Park Slope outpost on August 2 states the butcher shop will be temporarily closed through August. Following the walkout, at least 20 of the company’s roughly 40 workers resigned. Luke Fortney/EaterĪdams put the signs back up at the Westport and Park Slope stores within 24 hours, but former employees say it was too little too late. A sign posted to the door of Fleishers in Park Slope on Tuesday, August 2. His staff in Park Slope agreed to follow suit, and workers on the Upper East Side walked out the same afternoon, forcing all four tristate butcheries to temporarily close. Thompson received a call from a store manager in Connecticut later that morning, who told him that workers at the Greenwich and Westport locations had banded to together to walk out. Thompson, who is Black, says that removing the signs “sent a message” to the company’s staff, approximately half of which identify as either LGBTQIA+ or BIPOC, according to former employees. In the hours after the incident, “the atmosphere was at a fever pitch,” says Ajani Thompson, the former manager of Fleishers in Park Slope. The following morning on July 23, Adams returned to New York City and removed signs from the butcher shop located in Park Slope. Rosania, a real estate developer and billionaire wine collector, called Adams and instructed him to remove the signs, according to former workers with knowledge of the events.įormer employees say that Adams, the company’s newly minted chief executive and fifth CEO in five years, took a train from the company’s headquarters in New York to its butcher shop in Westport to remove the sign, along with a second sign that depicted a Black fist raised over a Pride flag. The incident that sparked the walkout occurred on July 22, when Rosania reportedly received a text message from a friend, claiming they were offended by a sign in support of the Black Lives Matter movement hanging in the Westport store’s window. The move came after Robert Rosania, the company’s leading investor, instructed Fleishers CEO John Adams to remove signs supporting the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA+ movements from storefronts in New York and Connecticut. Pioneering tristate butcher shop Fleishers has temporarily closed all four of its locations after roughly three dozen employees orchestrated a walkout on July 23.
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