Eccentric Vineyard Owner Sued for Worker Exploitation

Tamara Jaffe-Notier

WITTENBURG DOOR PRESS—After repeated attempts to negotiate with management regarding the unusual pay scale at Grace Vineyards, the morning vineyard workers have taken their case to court.

“This ridiculous idea that the people hired at noon—and even later, in some cases—should receive the same wage as people who have been working in the vineyard since the crack of dawn is no longer acceptable,” declared Labor leader Ivant Moore. “Mr. Lord does not have the right to abuse his morning workers just because he has some delusion about being generous to those bums who aren’t ready to go to work in the morning! It’s an outrage!”

In response, I.B. Lord, owner and manager of Grace Vineyards, was quick to point out that Moore and the other morning vineyard workers had received exactly the wages promised them according to the contract they accepted when hired.

“I really don’t see where the problem is,” Lord said. “I promised to pay Ivant and all the other morning hires one denarius for a day’s work, and I did. I needed more laborers in my vineyard, so I went back out in the afternoon and found some. Who cares what I pay them? Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?”

Spokesperson Ima Cinner, representing vineyard workers hired in the afternoon expressed the group’s solidarity with Vineyard Works Local MAT20.

“We respect the work and the needs of the Local MAT20 vineyard workers hired in the morning,” Cinner said. “Without them, the vineyard would be crap. I wish that I too had been hired in the morning—I spent my morning pounding the pavement looking for work. It wasn’t until the afternoon that I even knew that Mr. Lord’s vineyard existed and that jobs were available.

“At the end of the day we honestly did not expect to be receiving the same wage paid to Mr. Moore and the other employees who had been laboring all day, but that was what Mr. Lord gave us. We certainly did not want to get crossways with the union. Still, Mr. Lord said that things were just a little bit different at Grace Vineyards.”

Preliminary hearings in the case begin soon, with undisclosed numbers of witnesses readying to testify in Local MAT20’s lawsuit trial.

Against his lawyers’ advice, Lord is still hiring, and still paying the late hires the same wage that he pays those who have toiled from the beginning of the day.

Kingdom of Heaven mediators have no official comment on the case, except to point out that the Kingdom of Heaven—where Mr. Lord’s vineyard is located—is not a democracy, not a member of the G-8, does not have a capitalist economy either internally or externally, and has no ambition to join the United Nations or NAFTA, for that matter.

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