United Employees Sue the Airline for Unsafe Food Practices

According to the CDC, Listeria monocytogenes is a bacterium most commonly transmitted through contaminated food that can cause serious infection, particularly among pregnant, elderly, or immunocompromised populations. Former employees now allege United Airlines did not take sufficient action on food safety after a listeria contamination.

United Airlines is facing two lawsuits in federal court that claim the carrier disregarded an ongoing food safety problem in its catering facility at Newark International Airport (EWR) and attempted to cover up the issue when employees brought it to light.

CNBC reports that three former United employees filed suit last month. Each suit came from an individual who was involved in one way or another with food prep or safety for the airline: Marcia Lee was the Senior Manager for Food Safety, and Eliot Mosby and Gustavo Moya were General Manager and Food Safety Manager of the Newark facility respectively.

The suits claim shoddy food safety conditions that allowed a strain of listeria to spread within the Newark catering facility, which supplies nearly 45,000 meals a day to both domestic and international flights. Marcia Lee’s lawsuit claims that she informed United that the facility tested positive for listeria in September 2017, but that “United’s upper management resisted keeping the food on hold due to business concerns, and advised, in sum and substance, that United was going to delay making mandatory reports to the FDA concerning the situation.” Mosby similarly alerted United in 2017 that he considered the conditions at Newark a “major public health risk.”

Though United told CNBC that the strains of listeria found were innocuous, records show that testing between February and August of this year turned up 175 positive results for listeria, of which 27 were classified as Listeria monocytogenes (or L. mono), the bacterium responsible for listeriosis infections.

Lee, Mosby, and Moya are also claiming that the airlines took retaliatory measures against them when they tried to sound the public health alarm. Mosby and Moya were both reassigned to United’s Chicago headquarters after reporting about conditions in Newark, and Lee alleges that she was forced to resign in 2017.

United tells CNBC that they are making infrastructure fixes to the catering facility, particularly addressing issues with refrigeration, and that a recent FDA inspection did not turn up any problems. However, the FDA could neither confirm nor deny the inspection to the network.

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