Group fights segregation in Bay Area restaurants
When Demonte Lane recounts his past few years working in the Bay Area restaurant industry, his stories are tinged with equal parts frustration and resignation.
He saw white workers shuffled into higher-paying server jobs, while people of color like himself were relegated to posts as dishwashers, porters or prep cooks. His first restaurant job was a front-of-house position at a mid-level place in Oakland. His stint there ended amid a flurry of raise denials, demotions and an inexplicable firing, he said.
“One of the owners, who was white, brought in one of his white friends to do a similar job as me,” said Lane, now a busser at Kingston 11 in Oakland. “Then I noticed he was getting raises. Then I was suddenly bumped down.”
Lane’s experience is not an anomaly, according to Ephraim Colbert of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, a national restaurant worker advocacy group comprised of more than 25,000 workers, 600 restaurant owners and 15,000 consumers.
Colbert spent 10 years as a fine dining server, often being the only person of color on predominantly white staffs. His tales of raise denials and career stagnation are similar to Lane’s.
“This practice, and others, is very common in the restaurant industry where people of color are overlooked and replaced by a fresh white face,” said Colbert.
Occupational segregation is a nationwide issue in the restaurant industry, and the Bay Area is among the country’s worst offenders. Despite the region’s liberal and inclusive reputation, the race/wage gap in San Francisco is the highest in the country — roughly twice that of Houston.
According to ROC studies, white male restaurant workers in San Francisco get hired faster, promoted sooner and paid more — specifically, $6 more per hour — than their Latino, black and Asian coworkers. ROC’s data draw from more than 500 worker surveys, government data analyses, interviews with employers and Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
Furthermore, the restaurant positions held by people of color also show segregation; from the kitchen to the dining room table, a plate of food in San Francisco moves farther away from brown hands the closer it gets to a paying customer.
“Basically, the farther into a restaurant you go, the skin color gets darker,” said Saru Jayaraman, ROC co-founder. “The system is broken, and it has to change.”
The Bay Area restaurant industry is one of the largest in the country, with around 200,000 workers. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of food service businesses in the Bay Area increased 21 percent, as the field grew to 9.5 percent of the regional economy, generating well over $10 billion in revenue and $905 million in sales tax on federal and local levels, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
With the highest average restaurant wages in the country at $15 per hour, and about $18 per hour in the fine dining realm, San Francisco is filled with promise for restaurant workers. The promise just isn’t equally available to workers with darker skin, Jayaraman said.
Minorities in the Bay Area most often fill back-of-thehouse positions as dishwashers, line cooks, bussers and porters — staff who rarely interact with consumers. The more visible positions of maitre d’s or servers, who in fine dining can make upward of $100,000 annually, are positions predominantly occupied by white men, despite this demographic making up less than 25 percent of the workforce overall.
Founded in New York City after 9/11, ROC made national headlines earlier this year after launching the Sanctuary Restaurants Movement, a campaign promoting tolerance in the food industry. The movement was a direct response to President Trump’s stances on immigration issues. Hundreds of restaurants have signed up across the country, including dozens in the Bay Area.
“The sanctuary movement has been a big draw to get people to talk to us,” Jayaraman said. “Now we think it’s important to turn our sights toward the Bay Area.”
ROC is taking a long-term approach to the Bay Area,
punctuated by a large brickand-mortar presence in Oakland. The organization recently purchased a building in Fruitvale through a partnership with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. There, ROC will build a new restaurant named Colors, a training facility and a worker-owned cooperative incubator.
“Opening Colors across from the Fruitvale BART Station allows us to begin training hundreds of workers of color to move into fine dining,” Jayaraman said. In the fine dining realm, white workers earn $22 per hour, while people of color in the same restaurants earn $16.
ROC is also launching pilot programs at a pair of San Francisco restaurants to address real and perceived barriers influencing occupational segregation. Daniel Patterson’s Mid-Market restaurant, Alta CA, is one of the participants; the other has yet to be identified.
Patterson is no stranger to the intersection of race and food. Last year, he helped launch Locol, an ambitious restaurant chain with locations in Watts and Oakland, built to provide healthier fast food options to lower-income areas.
With ROC’s guidance and Patterson’s participation, Alta is reshaping its staff, a process that might not immediately be noticeable to customers. To improve advancement opportunities for employees of color, Patterson said servers will take support shifts and bartenders will take back bar shifts, and vice versa. Pay will be tied to people — not to positions.
“We want the best, most well-trained and experienced servers to be excited about taking any shift they are given,” Patterson said. “Cycling less experienced servers through the more front-line positions will improve their growth and learning.”
As ROC’s programs gain traction in the Bay Area, Patterson said his focus will be on the transition at Alta, with the goal of creating a model that can be replicated. The first push will also involve standardizing hiring, training and promotion practices.
“When your most qualified person doesn’t get the position they deserve, the restaurant suffers, and the industry suffers,” he said.
Next month, Patterson plans to make a change that diners will notice: Alta will go tipless.
The changes at Alta are meant to break down stereotypes associated with race and job positions, which Jayaraman said has been perpetuated through unconscious bias. Several Bay Area restaurateurs, along with ROC advocates, see tipping as a business component that fosters racial and gender discrimination, as well as sexual harassment.
Demonte Lane said he has witnessed the influence, both subtle and overt, that racial bias can have in a restaurant. Brown employees are viewed differently, he said — especially when it comes to tips.
“It’s enough to make you miserable,” Lane said. “When I was in that environment, I definitely was.”
Not just restaurant owners and employers are being targeted by ROC’s new Bay Area initiatives. The program reaches out to workers to locate obstacles barring their advancement in the industry, from transportation complications to self-selection bias; there are also training programs where workers — like Kingston 11’s Lane — can learn new skills. And when it comes to diners, ROC wants to know if diners are uncomfortable with servers of color and, similar to employers, if some form of bias exists.
The process hasn’t been without its fair share of hurdles, Jayaraman said. In San Francisco, a city touted for its open-mindedness and acceptance, the conversation about segregation can be a touchy one to have, she said.
“There is definitely this crowd where they say they’re open and accepting, but it just doesn’t show,” she said. “It’s uncomfortable for people when confronted with the reality that the restaurant they love, the place is extremely segregated and something has to be done.”
Kim Malek of Portland, Ore., ice cream company Salt & Straw recently opened her first Bay Area outpost on Fillmore Street. She said she noticed the racial gap in the San Francisco restaurant scene and, similar to the ROC ethos, agreed changes must start on the management level. As a result, Salt & Straw has implemented training classes that, in part, focus on race issues and promoting equality.
“I think a strong business can only exist with a strong community, and your business should reflect the community in a positive way,” Malek said. “You have to provide opportunities.”
The Bay Area ROC outpost launched in 2013 and currently represents thousands of workers in the Bay Area. Jayaraman said that by expanding the organization’s local footprint — through Alta CA, Colors and the business incubator — more attention can be drawn to the prevalence of implicit bias in one of the country’s largest restaurant industries.
“If you can’t get rid of that, you can train all the workers of the color in the world, but they will never get hired anywhere,” she said. “And then San Francisco will remain exactly as it is.”
“Basically, the farther into a restaurant you go, the skin color gets darker. The system is broken, and it has to change.” Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United