Migrant Mexican worker wins case against farm, awarded $25,000

NORFOLK COUNTY — A Mexican worker has been awarded $25,000 for being unjustly fired, an Ontario Labour Relations Tribunal ruled.
Mexican worker Gabriel Flores said that he’d been fired by Scotlynn Sweetpac Growers Inc. — better known as Scotlynn Farms — after his boss charged that he had spoken out about conditions on the farm.

Flores said that he was confronted with cell phone footage of a worker speaking to the news media. He told the board that he didn’t speak to the media and it was someone else in the video but his boss, Robert Biddle, told him he was going to be sent home in the “wee hours of the night.”

Farm owner Robert Biddle told the board that Flores quit because he was concerned about COVID-19 and that a confrontation never happened. Biddle is no longer the farm owner. He sold the operation to his son.
The board concluded that while “much of the evidence about important conversations was in dispute,” Flores and his witnesses were more credible.
“On the whole, (the board) found the applicant’s witnesses (including the applicant, himself) to be more believable,” the board concluded. “They resisted the temptation of self-serving evidence, were not evasive even when asked difficult questions, and provided a consistent narrative that was more in line with the preponderance of probabilities.”

The board was more skeptical of the farms’ witnesses, noting contradictions in testimony and evidence, such as the farm not filing the required paperwork that it has done every other time an employee quits. The farm also paid for Flores’ flight home, an obligation in the event of a firing.
The board ordered the farm to pay Flores $25,000 for lost wages and mental distress.

Scotlynn Farms had one of the largest and most serious outbreaks of COVID-19, as 190 workers tested positive. Worker Juan Lopez Chaparro died.