Image courtesy of The Batavian

For the past few months, employees of the Le Roy Dunkin have not been happy with the working conditions, so on Monday August 24, they decided to do something about it. At around 10 a.m. all employees dropped their aprons and walked out of the building. 

The walk out was brought on by several problems that the employees had to go through at work. Karissa Michel has worked at the Dunkin in Le Roy for about three years and wasn’t present at the walk out, but is not surprised because the week prior things were worse than ever. 

“There were so many problems with that place, but when our old manager Janet was replaced with someone new, it was really the last straw.” Michel said. 

“I would come in at five a.m. for my morning shift and the new manager would sit in the back on their phone and not help me, and as the day went on and other employees would come in, the manager would still sit back there and rarely come up unless we asked for their help.”

According to Michel, the manager never ordered the right things or enough of it so they would run out of products and customers would complain. Michel explained how during the pandemic, customers were more stressed out and rude then they have been in the past so not having a certain syrup or donut would cause a lot of problems and customers would take all that anger out on the employees.

“There were also incidents where I was sent inappropriate messages from different coworkers and when I reported it the district manager never cared or took care of it, and they made me work long shifts with them which was against my wishes and also very uncomfortable.” Michel said. 

Not only were there problems with how the management worked, but also how the building itself was being taken care of. 

“We constantly needed things fixed and one day last summer the pipes in the bathroom were backed up and sewage and stuff was coming up onto the floor. Instead of shutting us down they made us work in it, my shoes were soaked and it was all over my clothes.” Michel said. 

“There was also an issue with flies and maggots in the frozen machine that was never taken care of properly and we were told we needed to close for a whole day so that an exterminator could smoke the store and kill them but the district manager never let us.” Michel added. 

“I think a lot of these issues happened over long periods of time and people just got tired of it.”

The day the walk out happened, Michel was getting texts from a fellow coworker saying that he had enough and that he wanted to leave. Jacob Wright was one of the employees that walked out on August 24. 

“We had two people quit right before the walkout and I was told by the two other employees that if I wanted to walkout, they would too. There has been a lot of pent up stress from the place being run poorly and that all kind of led to the decision. It felt relieving to actually walkout and I wouldn’t have to go back there anymore.” Wright said. 

Dunkin is still open but with all of the original employees not working there anymore, the Le Roy Dunkin continues to operate understaffed.