Rose Acre Farms Inc., DOJ Reach Settlement Over Unfair Employment Practices Suit

A lawsuit between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Rose Acre Farms Inc. over “unfair immigration-related employment practices” reached a settlement yesterday on August 6. The suit was filed by the DOJ back in November 2012 when it accused the farm, which is the “second largest egg producer in the nation, of violating the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by discriminating against non-U.S. citizens who were work-authorized.”

According to the suit, Rose Acre Farms Inc. allegedly “routinely required their work-authorized non-U.S. citizens to present a Permanent Resident Card or Employment Authorization Document to prove their eligibility” between June 2009 and December 2011. However, the egg-producing company did not have these requirements for their U.S. citizen employees.

In the lawsuit, the DOJ argued that “all work-authorized individuals, including those who are U.S. citizens and those who are not, all have the right to choose which documentation to present, in order to prove their validity to work.” Acting Assistant Attorney General John Gore of the Civil Rights Division chimed in on the matter with the following statement:

For those who don’t know, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is equipped with an anti-discrimination provision which prevents “employers from letting employees go through unnecessary documentary demands based on factors such as their citizenship or nationality.”

So what did Rose Acre agree to in the settlement? How does it plan to change so it’s no longer violating the INA? Well, for starters it will “pay a civil penalty of $70,000,” according to the agreement. Additionally, it will also educate and “train its employees on the INA’s anti-discrimination provision,” and will be “monitored for two years.” The settlement also prohibits the farm from intimidating, threatening, coercing, or retaliating against any of their employees over the settlement.

This isn’t the first time the egg-producing company has been in the news recently, though. Earlier this year in April, the company was at the center of a massive egg recall. During the recall, the company had to recall more than “200 million of their eggs due to salmonella fears…after about 22 illnesses were reported in connection with their eggs.” As the second-largest egg producer in the U.S., the recall was a big deal for the company, especially once it was discovered that the salmonella contamination was linked to one of it’s Hyde County farms where nearly “three million egg-laying hens produced about 2.3 million eggs per day.”