A former area organizer for Michael R. Bloomberg filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in opposition to his presidential marketing campaign Monday,
A former area organizer for Michael R. Bloomberg filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in opposition to his presidential marketing campaign Monday, arguing that she and hundreds of others laid off this month had been tricked into taking jobs they have been informed would final till November.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court docket in New York Metropolis, argued that the marketing campaign had breached its contract with the at-will staff, recruiting them to work on Mr. Bloomberg’s bid underneath false pretenses and failing to pay them mandatory extra time.
In dismissing the employees eight months sooner than promised, the grievance stated, the marketing campaign had “disadvantaged them of promised earnings and well being care advantages, leaving them and their households probably uninsured within the face of a world pandemic.”
“Persons are going from a fairly beneficiant well being care profit to projected 20 to 30 p.c unemployment,” stated Sally J. Abrahamson, a Washington lawyer representing the previous area organizer named within the grievance, Donna Wooden, who labored for Mr. Bloomberg in Miami and was laid off on Friday.
A spokeswoman for the marketing campaign declined to touch upon Monday.
Mr. Bloomberg — a multibillionaire who entered the Democratic race in late November and dropped out in early March — assembled a military of marketing campaign employees shortly, attracting them with unusually high pay, full benefits and the lure of campaign work through the fall, regardless of who won the Democratic nomination. He spent more than $900 million along the way and repeatedly promised to deploy his campaign in service of whoever the party ultimately selected.
But on March 9, days after he exited the race, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign laid off field workers in all but six battleground states, asking if they were open to relocating to one of those states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — or if they wanted to be referred to another presidential campaign.
Last week, as he announced an $18 million donation to the Democratic National Committee in place of a new super PAC designed to help Democrats in the presidential race, Mr. Bloomberg also laid off staff members like Ms. Wood who had worked in those six states.
His campaign invited all former employees to apply to work for the D.N.C., though it called the hiring process competitive and specified that pay and benefits would be different. The campaign said in a news release last week that D.N.C. staffing would draw “in part from our own incredibly experienced and talented organizing staff.”
Some affected employees, including people who had left stable jobs to work for Mr. Bloomberg, as Ms. Wood did, expressed frustration publicly, in spite of the confidentiality and non-disparagement agreements they had signed. They said they would not have accepted the work had they known its true terms.
Brynne Craig, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, said last week that the former mayor remained determined to fund the effort to topple President Trump.
“We’re changing the mechanism, not our commitment,” she said, calling it more effective to coordinate field efforts through the D.N.C.
While some field organizers have applied for the D.N.C. work, they remain aggrieved. “This is a tight-knit community, and they’re all mad, they’re all hurt and they’re all scared, especially at a time when health insurance is so important,” Gregg I. Shavitz, another lawyer for Ms. Wood, said Monday.
A set of interview talking points used by the campaign to hire field organizers and seen by The New York Times referenced “full health, dental and vision benefits” and “employment through November 2020 with Team Bloomberg.” But signed contracts seen by The Times also stipulated that employment was at-will, allowing for termination at any time. The contracts also specified that the workers were “classified as exempt from the overtime provisions of federal and applicable state laws.”
Ms. Wood’s legal complaint challenged that, claiming violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and arguing that none of the exemptions applied to the field organizers, who had little discretion in doing their jobs and routinely worked more than 40 hours a week.
“Essentially, you need to be running an organization or have a lot of discretion,” Ms. Abrahamson said. “You maybe don’t see a lot of these in campaign world because people don’t want to come forward and burn employers, but this is an unprecedented time.”