Staff and Wire Reports
San Juan Bautista
– The local company linked to a nationwide E. coli outbreak of
contaminated spinach laid off 164 employees, most of them seasonal
hires who had expected to leave when the growing season ends next
month.
San Juan Bautista – The local company linked to a nationwide E. coli outbreak of contaminated spinach laid off 164 employees, most of them seasonal hires who had expected to leave when the growing season ends next month.
“It’s really painful and sad to see anybody go,” said spokeswoman Samantha Cabaluna of Natural Selection Foods LLC. “Especially ones who have been with us through hard times.”
Natural Selection terminated 116 plant workers whose jobs would have normally lasted another three or four weeks, Cabaluna said Wednesday.
During the winter, many Central California produce companies, including Natural Selection, shift their growing operations to warmer areas.
“This is something that was bound to happen,” San Benito County Farm Bureau President Paul Hain said. “You see this shift every year, but it just came a little earlier this year because of what happened. I don’t think this is a surprise.”
The other terminations – eight sales representatives and 40 processing plant employees – were blamed on a 70 percent drop in sales of bagged salads since authorities began warning consumers not to eat prepackaged spinach on Sept. 15. The outbreak has sickened nearly 200 people and killed three.
“We’re sad to see anyone go,” Cabaluna said, adding that the company will remain the county’s largest employer with 1,012 employees.
Seasonal workers did not receive any incentives for leaving early, but other employees did receive severance packages according to how long they had been employed by Earthbound Farm, a subsidiary of Natural Selection. Cabaluna did not know how many San Benito County residents had been affected by the layoffs, but did say that most employees were local.
“Something like this could affect the local economy outside of just agriculture, because everything is linked in business,” said Kathy Flores, Director of County Health and Human Services. Flores could not recall the last time a San Benito County business was forced to issue layoffs on a large scale. “This will impact these families, their discretionary income, maybe even their ability to purchase the basic necessities.”
Flores said her department and the office of Community Services and Workforce Development had expected layoffs in the wake of the outbreak, but have had trouble in the past few weeks determining fact from fiction.
Before the outbreak, the company had been growing rapidly and planning to add another processing plant. Many of the year-round employees who lost their jobs had been hired to staff a second plant Natural Selection agreed to buy earlier this year. The company backed out of the deal after the contamination became known.
