Woodbine Alaska Fish Co. has settled the wage claims of nine former employees, agreeing to pay nearly $75,000 in unpaid wages and penalties required by state law.
The former employees had filed wage claims with the state labor department's Wage and Hour Administration between 2002 and 2004 after they weren't able to cash their paychecks due to insufficient funds in Woodbine accounts.
Woodbine, based in Rio Vista, Calif., operates a fish processing plant in Egegik, some 100 miles southwest of Dillingham.
Wage and hour supervising investigator Sam Conklin told Judge John Lohff by phone Jan. 20 that he and Woodbine's attorney, Cory Birnberg of San Francisco, had settled the claims of four former Woodbine employees earlier that day. The claims ranged from about $8,500 to nearly $20,000.
The five other claims were settled after wage and hour investigator Julie Treadway stepped outside of Judge Lohff's courtroom at the Nesbett State Courthouse in downtown Anchorage to speak with Birnberg by phone.
Birnberg agreed that Woodbine would pay those claims, ranging from about $1,260 to just more than $7,000, Treadway said in an interview following the hearing.
Judge Lohff scheduled a follow-up hearing Feb. 24, at which time he said he expected to see the settlement agreements.
A court date for some 40 additional wage claims by other Woodbine employees has yet to be set, Treadway said in an interview.
Most of these claims were filed by Turkish or Slovakian exchange students who had worked at the fish processing plant during the 2004 summer.
While Birnberg did not say when or how Woodbine plans to address these additional claims, he said that his client intends to resolve them. "Any claims that they have, it is always our intent to resolve them favorably."
Birnberg declined to comment on Woodbine's agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor to pay former employees backwages.
Woodbine has agreed to deposit the proceeds of product it sold to Netherlands-based MCM Foods into an account, according to the agreement signed Nov. 3 by Birnberg and Faye von Wrangol, senior trial attorney for labor department. The amount was not included in court documents.
The account's funds are to be used to pay Woodbine employees of the 2003 and 2004 salmon processing season who had not been paid overtime and minimum wages required by the Fair Labor Standards Act.
It is possible that some of Woodbine's employees filed with both the state and federal labor departments, according to Treadway.
If an employee who has filed with both departments receives payment for backwages from the account arranged by the federal department of labor, Treadway said her department would give Woodbine credit for those wages. The state labor department, however, could still collect the penalties from the former employees' wage claims.
