Things were going well for Monica López at her new job at the Ideal Snacks factory in Liberty, located in Sullivan County midway between Poughkeepsie and the Pennsylvania border. She and her husband had relocated from a town further west that offered mostly agricultural employment. The Ideal Snacks plant—one of the largest employers in the county—offered her a better opportunity to work.
She started in March 2011, packing boxes full of chips and other snacks, along with other manual tasks like cleaning the machines. When she began, she heard co-workers complain about the behavior of the supervisors, but she was new and unfamiliar with people.
