At Chipotle, They Ignore the Rats and Punish the Workers
We spoke to a Chipotle employee forced to work amid rodent infestations so extreme that he and several colleagues were bitten by rats. All this while COVID devastates their ranks. No one should have to risk their health for the sake of corporate profits.
Chipotle has been at the center of several food-safety incidents in the past decade. (Shanti Braford / Flickr)
Luis Gustavo Paulino Ruiz was in the trash room at the Chipotle on Broadway near West 169th Street in Washington Heights in November when a rat bit his finger. The infestation was old news among the staff: as the New York Post first reported, workers say the rats had arrived during the summer, and the first case of an employee being bitten by one occurred in October.
The store stayed open for a month after that first incident, and when it closed, the company scheduled the employees to continue coming in to clean as extermination was ongoing. That’s when Paulino Ruiz was bitten.
“I was worried about what kind of diseases I could catch,” he tells me through a translator. One of the store’s managers took him to the hospital.
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