Like many companies in the Bay Area and beyond, Boba Guys posted social media messages expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter earlier this month as protests began to sweep the region.
But co-founder Andrew Chau’s videos on Instagram didn’t draw widespread approval. Instead, they disturbed former employees, especially Black and brown workers who said their experiences working at the local boba tea chain did not line up with Chau’s words.
“It made me really angry seeing he was preaching diversity and inclusion when he was completely passive when it came to overtly racist comments made on his company’s time,” said Kira Roman, a former employee at the chain’s San Carlos location.
Roman’s complaint — that she overheard a manager making racist statements in 2018 — circulated online this month, leading Chau and co-founder Bin Chen to finally part ways with the manager. That sparked more stories from other workers of color. One said he faced sexual harassment, another said she regularly dealt with racist customers — and several said they didn’t get support when they reported problems to management.
Chau and Chen were surprised to hear about some of these allegations, which have arisen on social media and in an interview with The Chronicle. But they say they’re focused on making Boba Guys a better, safer and more inclusive place to work.
Since Roman’s complaint went public, they’ve invested in bias training; rolled out a new way to report harassment, hired a third-party investigator and enlisted human resource services. Previously, Boba Guys lacked an HR staff despite employing nearly 400 people across more than a dozen locations in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York. After the coronavirus spurred mass layoffs, Boba Guys now employs about 100 people as it slowly reopens stores.
Similar reckonings are playing out at businesses nationwide as workers speak out against what they deem performative allyship, a term that’s caught on since last month’s killing of George Floyd to refer to surface-level support of the Black community without any real action.
After such uproar, Dandelion Chocolate CEO Todd Masonis publicly acknowledged that a past incident at the San Francisco company was racist. The chef-owner of seminal Macanese restaurant Fat Rice in Chicago apologized for creating a hostile work environment. And Mission Chinese Food’s New York location is once again making headlines for past allegations of racial discrimination.
While Boba Guys workers thought their individual experiences were unique, the social media uproar has led them to band together and consider legal recourse. It’s a disappointing development to employees who were initially thrilled to work for Boba Guys, believing in its stated mission of bridging cultures. The company, born in 2011 in San Francisco’s Mission District, has always made progressive values central to its identity. But over time, these workers began to think more critically about the Boba Guys mission.
“It honestly feels like they’re trying to bridge cultures from the Asian elites to the white elites,” said former San Francisco employee Tori Santiago.
When Roman saw Chau’s Instagram posts about Black Lives Matter earlier this month, she spoke out on social media about a comment from a manager she overheard in 2018.
“He said that he would not take a drink made by a Black person because they have ‘a poor work ethic and are lazy,’” Roman said.
In response to her posts, Chau uploaded a 15-minute video to the Boba Guys account, since deleted, stating he didn’t fire the manager at the time because he “couldn’t get to an actual truth.”
“Was it racist or this person doesn’t really hear how he talks?” Chau said in the June 7 video. He said the manager was eventually demoted — a year later, in 2019 — because of other complaints.
Now, Chau and Chen say that video wasn’t a sufficient apology.
“We really had to sit and listen to hear loud and clear the pain and frustration, and it was super valid and warranted. We apologize for that. That’s the first step, to take ownership of that,” Chen said. “We realize how biases can play out and how much we just don’t know.”
But Roman told The Chronicle that it wasn’t just the initial comment that infuriated her. When she told the manager his words were inappropriate at work, he said she must have heard him wrong, that he’s not racist and that he has a Black friend, she said.
After that confrontation, she said she found her hours the next week cut from 40 a week to zero.
“My white counterparts were praised for mediocrity and as soon as I brought up these racist comments, I was essentially blacklisted in the company,” said Roman, who is half Caribbean and half Central American.
Roman quit. In a resignation letter sent to the manager as well as Chau, she explained her reasoning and cited the racist comment. Chau never responded, though more than a year later, he emailed her about the incident, saying, “There is more nuance to it that you probably won’t believe.”
“We just have to do better. There’s no excuse,” Chen told The Chronicle. “We had an opportunity to exercise these values on behalf of the Black community and other minority groups and we failed to act.”
Chau and Chen said they thought the 2018 incident involving Roman was isolated but recently have heard other concerning stories.
Jasmine Fossett, a Black woman who worked as a barista at the Union Square location, transferred to one of Boba Guys’ New York cafes for the summer of 2018. There, she told her new manager about how a worker once got fired from the Union Square shop for stealing out of the cash register. He asked her if the fired employee was Black.
“He was like, ‘Yeah, Black people start stealing after the first three weeks of working,’” said Fossett. “I shut him down right away.”
Fossett says the New York manager told her it was just his sense of humor. But after that, she said, she felt the manager was overly critical of her work and reduced her shifts. She said she didn’t complain further since it was a temporary post.
When she got back to San Francisco, Fossett said she relayed the manager’s comment to someone in upper management, who apologized but did not act further. As this month, the New York manager is no longer with the company, according to Chau.
Fossett says she also felt that white and Asian colleagues were getting promotions before her, even though she had worked at Boba Guys longer. When she did get promoted to a shift lead, she said, she didn’t receive a raise because of her score on a customer service test. Though she scored 87%, she said, the test was graded on a curve, meaning some employees couldn’t score high enough. In one simulation, she was docked points for verbally wishing a customer happy birthday instead of writing a birthday message on their cup, according to an email of her test results.
“They try to make you feel you’re contributing toward something and you have opportunities for growth, but you start to realize only certain people have those opportunities,” Fossett said. She was laid off in March when shelter-in-place forced Boba Guys stores to close.
Wen Neale, who worked as a shift lead at the Mission District cafe for two years, noticed these dynamics too — though he believes he benefited from them as an Asian employee.
Still, Neale said he dealt with a manager who sexually harassed him at work, constantly asking him out on dates when he wasn’t interested. When he complained to a different manager, nothing happened, he said. Chau and Chen told The Chronicle they were aware of some tension between the two employees but didn’t know about the sexual harassment allegation.
Neale said he also observed the same manager insult Black and Latino employees, calling them “lazy and half-assed workers.” The manager was relocated to a different store, where another employee, Tori Santiago, said these comments continued. The manager has since left the company.
“They promote this feeling like we’re a family, we have to look out for each other. They use that — intentionally or not — to manipulate our mindsets about coming forward,” said Neale said, who quit in frustration.
Other Black employees who spoke with The Chronicle said they felt disrespected and accused of having attitude problems.
Tamia Proctor worked at the Union Square location for two years. She said she regularly served Asian tourists who likely had never encountered a Black person before.
“A lot of customers were being openly racist to me, throwing their credit cards at me, throwing money at me, accusing me of charging them wrong,” Proctor said. “I’ve been cursed out before. A group pretended they don’t speak English so they could talk to someone else.”
Fossett, who worked at the same location, confirmed these incidents.
Serving these customers was demoralizing for Proctor, who said she didn’t receive support when she talked to managers about it. “We were told we were the problem,” she said. Earlier this year, she quit, feeling overworked and undervalued.
Dealing with customers exhibiting racial bias is tricky territory, said Chen. He hopes the diversity firm they recently hired can provide guidance.
“I don’t know if Boba Guys can change guests’ opinions, but ultimately we have to create a safe environment for our team members,” he said.
To do so, former employees said, the company needs to uphold a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to racism. They also recommended hiring more Black and brown people in top positions; creating a system where people aren’t afraid to voice concerns; and eliminating any favoritism that might lead to keeping problematic employees.
Chau and Chen said they are working on all of that and more.
“We’ve been very intentional about building a company people want to work for, that people admire, that people say did more good than bad,” Chau said. “That was always the spirit of what we were trying to do. Hopefully our actions will speak for it.”
Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker
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