What's Inside Brooklyn Navy Yard's Building 664?

UPDATE, Oct. 27: B&H Photo is still denying us entry to Building 664.

For the past decade, in a windowless, 160,000-square-foot warehouse tucked along the eastern edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yard — under the nose of Brooklyn politicians, developers and high-profile neighbors — more than 200 laborers claim they’ve been toiling in hellish conditions that have crippled them physically, broken them down mentally and, more than once, endangered their lives.

The facility is the main storage and shipping hub for B&H Photo, the consumer electronics giant whose Manhattan megastore and online catalog are beloved by photo and film enthusiasts all over the world.

Its little-known factory is known only as Building 664.

And if the chilling stories B&H Photo factory workers now tell about life inside Building 664 turn out to be true, the factory should, under New York state labor law, easily qualify as a sweatshop, according to Stephanie Luce, a professor of labor studies for the City University of New York (CUNY).

The rooms inside Building 664 are thick with dust and oppressively hot and dirty, according to factory workers who spoke to Patch at a demonstration outside B&H’s iconic Manhattan storefront on Sunday.

“My nose is always bleeding,” B&H worker Jorge Lora, 36, said in Spanish, drawing an imaginary trickle of blood down his face with his index finger.

“I have many throat problems from the dust,” Lora said. “I wake up every morning with pain throughout my whole body.”

The allegations made by the workers, revealed this October with guidance from seasoned labor organizers at the nonprofit Laundry Workers Center, are staggering: Fiberglass that fills the air and embeds itself into workers’ skin, eyes and lungs, causing constant nosebleeds, rashes, obscured vision and breathing problems. Zero safety training. No gloves or hard hats. Backbreaking loads of camera equipment. Leaning towers of pallets, stacked to hazardous heights. Denial, by management, to provide water and bathroom breaks — causing workers to develop kidney stones and become severely dizzy, even faint — and refusal to address on-site injuries.

All of this, workers say, on shifts that often last 12 to 16 hours, with a single midday break.

In recent months, the feds have come sniffing. Safety complaints filed against Building 664 over the summer — and others filed against B&H’s second, smaller factory on Evergreen Avenue in Bushwick — prompted the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) to launch investigations at both sites.

“As these inspections have not been completed,” OSHA spokesman Ted Fitzgerald told Patch, “I can only confirm that OSHA is inspecting these work sites. The purpose of an inspection is to determine whether or not an employer has violated workplace safety and health.”

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When reached for comment, Henry Posner, director of corporate communications for B&H Photo, said: ”We are not commenting on that right now. I appreciate your calling and asking, but as of right now, we’re not commenting.”

(A public relations firm later sent an extensive statement on behalf of B&H Photo, which is included in full at the bottom of this story.)

Asked if any the factory conditions alleged by workers are accurate, Posner answered, “I’m in Manhattan, and the warehouse is in Brooklyn. I have to confess I’ve never been over there.”

Posner said he saw no reason why a Patch reporter couldn’t go have a look.

So, on a recent Tuesday evening, Patch attempted to perform an independent inspection of Building 664 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The warehouse, a mammoth container with no windows and scarce outdoor lighting, cut a dark silhouette against the brightly lit Steiner Studios campus that flanks it in the Navy Yard. At 7 p.m., around 25 vehicles, mostly vans for carpooling, still sat in the parking lot. Every few minutes, a male employee would pass through a metal detector in the front lobby and exit the building. Around half these men were dressed in traditional Orthodox Jewish clothing; the other half appeared to be of Hispanic descent.

Unlike at Sunday’s protest, nobody was willing to speak to Patch about conditions inside the factory when approached on the premises. Most gestured toward their managers’ office with a worried look when asked to explain why.

An Orthodox Jewish man who identified himself to Patch as the manager, and who gave his name as Gedaria Apel, said no one was allowed to enter the building without permission from the human resources department.

But the human resources department deferred back to Posner, the company’s communications director, to grant a reporter permission to enter.

By this time, Posner had changed his mind about allowing access.

He now said: “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

But a few brave B&H workers at Sunday’s protest told Patch that inside Building 664 — shut off from the outside world — they’re forced to carry stacks of 50- to 70-pound boxes on their own, often injuring themselves in the process.

Middle-aged worker Martin Gomez, from Mexico, said he was forced to quit his job at B&H’s Navy Yard factory around two months ago when he injured his knee lifting heavy boxes of camera equipment. He can’t walk anymore without a cane, and has had trouble finding other work.

Gomez said he’s received a few checks for under $100 from B&H, but that it hasn’t been nearly enough to cover his medical costs.

Another worker, Oscar Orellana, in an interview with Al Jazeera, said he suffered an especially severe spine injury in 2014 when fell from the top of an eight-foot-high stack of pallets in the warehouse.

“Even if I feel I am dying from the pain, I have to work,” Orellana said. Today, he can hardly lift his two-year-old daughter.

Others, like Orellana, say they’ve experienced extreme stress, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and panic attacks brought on by long, grueling shifts inside the stifling warehouse.

In what may amount to the most damning accusation against B&H Photo factory managers, workers say they found themselves stuck inside the warehouse on Sept. 5, 2014, as it filled with smoke from a massive truck fire blazing directly outside.

B&H Photo worker Baltizar Martinez recalled:

“There was a ton of smoke, but we continued working, even when the room filled with smoke. When we were finally allowed to leave, we had to go through the metal detectors. This process lasted for a half hour. When we got outside, there were 50 firefighters and a helicopter, and imagine! We had been inside, working, this whole time.”

CUNY professor Luce said B&H’s handling of the fire, and its lack of an evacuation plan, could have easily led to a situation like the ones at factories in Bangladesh, where workers haven’t been so lucky.

“They’re treating me like an animal,” said 25-year-old Raul De La Cruz, who’s been working at the factory for eight years — ever since he was 17 years old, newly arrived from Mexico.

“For many years, I didn’t know my rights,” De La Cruz said. “I didn’t know I was being exploited.”

De La Cruz said Orthodox Jewish workers and overseers at the factory often call the Hispanic workers by Hebrew names that sound as if they’re derogatory, although he can’t understand what they’re saying.

“It’s like we’re less than them,” he said.

The economic journal Crain’s New York has called B&H Photo, owned by multimillionaire Herman Schreiber, “one of the most prominent Hasidic-owned and -operated businesses in New York City.”

It’s also the the biggest non-chain photo and video equipment store in the United States, and the 38th most lucrative consumer-electronics retailer in all America and Canada. B&H collected nearly $385 million in revenue in 2014, according to Dealerscope Magazine.

The company recently partnered with MakerBot, a popular Brooklyn-based 3D printing company, to open a mini MakerBot mini-store inside the B&H superstore on Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue.

MakerBot’s spokesman did not return Patch’s request for comment on the allegations against B&H Photo. Neither did the office of Mayor Bill De Blasio, who just last week celebrated the Brooklyn Navy Yard as “one of the great success stories in all of New York City” and the driving force behind “one of the great capitals of film and television in this country and on this earth.”

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., which describes itself as ”landlord for the Yard’s 330 businesses,” deflected responsibility. A spokesperson said in a statement: “All Brooklyn Navy Yard tenant leases require all spaces to be maintained to the standard of code. All other inquiries should be directed to tenants.”

The 20-acre campus for Steiner Studios, the largest production lot outside Hollywood, runs adjacent to the B&H Photo factory; the walls of its five grand sound studios are no more than a stone’s throw from the walls of what could be Brooklyn’s own Bangladesh-style sweatshop.

“This is a case where I have no opinion as to something I know absolutely nothing about,” Douglas C. Steiner, head of Steiner Studios, said in a statement sent to Patch.

A spokesman for Brooklyn College, which just opened New York’s first public graduate film school on the Steiner lot, said: ”No comment.”

Within the past decade, B&H Photo has faced multiple lawsuits alleging that managers favored Orthodox Jewish laborers over Hispanic laborers, in both treatment and in pay. B&H settled one such discrimination case in 2007 for $4.3 million.

The New York State Dept. of Labor did not have an immediate comment on the most recent allegations, but a spokesperson said the department would review them and get back in touch.

After declining to provide comment for this story multiple times, B&H Photo’s communications director referred Patch to an external spokesman: Juda Engelmayer of 5W Public Relations.

Engelmayer sent the following statement to Patch on Wednesday evening.

B&H Photo is a classic, New York business who recognizes we could not have grown from where we began to what we are now without the dedication and contribution of our employees, each of whom is a valued team member. Employee satisfaction is as important to us, and as vital to us as customer satisfaction. The two are intertwined. Our commitment to our employees runs as deep as it does to our loyal customer base and they are the reasons we are here, and to both, we are eternally grateful.

We have committed, devoted, hard-working employees who earn above-average industry salaries, generous benefit packages, 17 paid days off annually, and 3-weeks paid vacation time. Our average employee tenure in our distribution and fulfillment center is more than five years. We provide terrific benefits, highly competitive wages and a safe, friendly environment.

B&H has a strong and independent human resources department which strictly adheres to workplace regulations. We take matters of employee satisfaction seriously and are committed to reaching even higher standards to ensure that we live up to our own expectations commensurate with the excellent reputation we have fostered over many years.

As to the matter of union representation, our employees have the right to seek such representation. It is a decision to be made by our employees, and there is a process underway to resolve that question.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article identified Building 664 as a “manufacturing plant.” No products are in fact manufactured at the building; it is instead used for storage and shipping.