A textile industry company in New York City will seek to end a lawsuit filed by more than 20,000 people who say the company violated federal health laws by failing to provide enough medical and food safety monitoring to workers in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Textile Industry is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges the company failed to monitor the health of its employees in response to the outbreak, according to court documents.
The suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, seeks an order that the company stop paying workers $10 a day for overtime and to pay $500,000 in damages to the company’s investors.
It also seeks an injunction preventing the company from further violating workers’ rights by requiring that they work overtime and pay for meals.
The lawsuit says that textile workers in New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania were left without medical care for up to 10 days at a time because they did not receive adequate testing for the virus.
Textiles workers in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey were not protected by state law, the suit alleges.
Textil Industry has agreed to pay the $10 per day per day, but a judge said in a ruling filed Tuesday that the payments were not substantial enough to prevent the company “from continuing to ignore and violate federal laws” that protect workers.
The textile industry is a $4.4 trillion industry with more than 4,000 textile plants.
Its production is driven by clothing, footwear and other textile goods.