MILBRIDGE – A Portland attorney has filed suit against a Milbridge sea cucumber processor on behalf of Spanish-speaking migrants who say the company allows them to work “off the clock” and that they are not paid overtime.

Donald F. Fontaine filed the complaint Monday in U.S. District Court in Bangor on behalf of 19 current and former Hispanic employees of Cherry Point Products Inc.

The suit requests a jury trial and a class action on behalf of all hourly workers Cherry Point has employed since it opened in 1995. Twelve of the 19 plaintiffs are current employees of the Milbridge processing operation.

The lawsuit charges the company and owner Drusilla Ray with violating federal and state labor laws by not paying time-and-a-half for work in excess of 40 hours a week.

The workers also allege that they are permitted to come to work in the early morning hours but are instructed not to punch in before 5:55 a.m.

Ray said Tuesday the allegations are false and she has the documentation to prove her case.

“I’ve got every time card since we opened, including the overtime hours people have worked,” Ray said. “If Donald Fontaine had checked with the [Labor Department’s] Federal Wage and Hour Division, he would know that we did pay overtime and there were no violations.”

Ray said she closed the plant as of Saturday because of excess inventory. She said she met with employees Monday night to explain the situation and told them she hopes to reopen within a few weeks. Cherry Point employs approximately 60 people, 40 of them are Hispanic.

Ray said the decision to close the plant has nothing to do with the lawsuit. Cherry Point Products Inc. closed in January and February because of surplus inventory, she said.

According to the lawsuit, the 19 plaintiffs often received two paychecks in the same week, sometimes from two different companies.

And although the paychecks totaled more than 40 hours a week, the workers were not paid time-and-a-half, according to the lawsuit.

In addition to Cherry Point Products, the suit names L. Ray Packing Co. and C&D Corp.

Ray said Tuesday that L. Ray Packing Co. is owned by her father-in-law and C&D Corp. is a blueberry company.

“I’m not affiliated with L. Ray Packing or C& D,” Ray said.

Ray said that when there wasn’t enough work at Cherry Point, the employees would process sardines for L. Ray Packing. Some workers also work raking or processing blueberries, she said.

“But these are different companies,” she said. “They’d get a check from me for 30 hours and a check from L. Ray Packing for what they did there.”

According to the lawsuit most of the plaintiffs were scrapers – the crew that slices into the sea cucumber and extracts the meat.

According to the lawsuit, Cherry Point pays scrapers on a piecework basis. But those same workers routinely clean the plant for several hours a week, according to the suit.

But their cleaning hours are not added to the hours they spend scraping when the company determines whether they’ve worked more than 40 hours a week, according to the lawsuit.

Ray said the federal government has a very complicated formula for determining how people are paid for piecework and hours and that Cherry Point Products uses that formula and a chart that is issued by the federal Wage and Hour Division.

“Federal Wage and Hour has been in here and looked at all of our books and we’ve had the state wage people in, too,” she said. “There have been no problems.”

Ray said the allegation about working off the clock is false. Some of the workers want to start working in the early morning hours and last year – when she had an Hispanic floor supervisor who came in early – people could punch in as early as 2 a.m., Ray said.

But when the floor supervisor moved to Portland, there was no one to supervise in the early morning hours, she said.

As a result, Ray said, she changed the punch-in time to 6 a.m., when there is someone there to make sure people are working.

Ray said she was “astonished” by the lawsuit.

Fontaine said Tuesday that if C&D Corp. is a blueberry company, the corporation would be dropped as a plaintiff in the suit.

Fontaine said he initially was contacted about the alleged labor law violations by the Maine Rural Workers Coalition of Lewiston.

Coalition Director Jose Soto said his organization learned of the alleged problems at Cherry Point Products from former employees who had moved to Portland.

Soto said the coalition began talking with workers in Milbridge about a year ago and found many problems.

Among those problems, Soto said, is that some workers end up with less than minimum wage because they are paid by the piece and are expected to pay Ray $50 a month in rent as well as buying two or three scraping knives a week.

Soto said the Maine Department of Labor’s Division of Migrant and Immigrant Services doesn’t have enough staff and as far as he knows has never been to the Milbridge plant.

“The Maine Department of Labor has too much work and not enough people,” he said. “They are never there. These are people who work a tremendous amount of hours in a job that local people won’t do because the conditions are so bad.”

Ray said she does not charge rent for the housing she provides for her workers, but she does ask each worker to contribute $50 a month toward the utility bill.

Cherry Point doesn’t supply knives – with the exception of the two that are issued when workers are hired – but the company does pay for mandatory equipment such as safety goggles, she said.

Ray said everyone – including new workers who can’t extract more than a pound of meat an hour – is guaranteed $6 an hour. Experienced workers can make at least $10 an hour on a piecework basis, she said.

“We know it takes time to learn how to do this,” Ray said.

George Rioux, the regional director for the U.S. Department of Labor, did not return a Tuesday afternoon call inquiring about Cherry Point’s compliance record.