by Sean Raycraft
Several years ago, while I was organizing with the Raise the Wage Davis campaign, one of my roles was to talk to working poor folks in town, collecting their stories and working to humanize them in the eyes of the public. Several years later, I’m still trying. Last year, one of the workers I met and talked to years ago told me that his partner was having some serious trouble with her employer, a local cheap pizza place. We agreed to meet up and talk a little about her situation, and see what I could do to help her out.
Gee, a Korean immigrant who is now a good friend, is in her late 20s, and came to our country as a small child. She came to Davis as a UC student roughly ten years ago, and struggled being away from her support structure. She ended up having to leave UC Davis, and work to support herself. She’s had various jobs over the years, mostly in the local food service industry. She and her partner have always struggled to get by, being working poor in Davis. Struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of housing here in town. Through most of their 20s, they were able to stay at a home owned by a family member, after that, they had to really struggle to get by. Fast forward a few years, to us talking over tea about the working conditions at Cenario’s Pizza.
During my time organizing and advocating for poor people, I have heard about and seen a lot of horrible working conditions. Workers every day are told to work in unsafe conditions, dirty conditions, to tolerate wage theft and sexual harassment, exposed to noxious chemicals, degraded and harassed by customers, patrons, other workers and management alike.
What Gee told me about her working conditions truly shocked me. Her boss would routinely “encourage” his employees to participate in his religious events. Employees who chose to participate would get favorable treatment. Her boss would schedule employees on their birthdays, because he didn’t believe in celebrating them. He did so because he could. The management would expect and even force employees to work through their meal breaks, and 10 minute breaks, in violation of all kinds of labor laws. Gee once tried to call in sick with a serious illness, and requested to use some of her sick time, and her boss told her “You can either come to work today, or you can never come back.” This particular gem is a clear violation of California’s AB 1522, the mandatory paid sick days law passed a few years ago. Keep in mind, Gee was working in food service. If she was forced to come to work sick, she would be touching, coughing, and sneezing into the food she was making… for you, the customer. Just so you all know, until fairly recently, Cenario’s Pizza supplied Davis Joint Unified School District with pizza. So yeah, sick workers were making food for your kids.
Her boss would routinely force workers to clock out during their shift when it got slow, and force them to return, punch in and begin work again when business picked up. Some days, the boss would 
have workers clock in and out four or five times in a given shift. The worker would often be at work for eight hours, and only actually get paid for five hours of work. Just so everyone understands, this practice is illegal in California. Then we talked about the practice of management actually just changing the workers’ clockings. Workers would have to stay late closing up the shop on a busy day, and the boss would just clock them out at their scheduled time, no matter how long they actually ended up working. When Gee pointed out to management that pizza toppings were kept at high temperatures for extended periods of time, her concerns were dismissed, and she was told not to bring up the issue of proper refrigeration again, or she would face discipline or termination.
When workers complained about their treatment to management, they were retaliated against. Their hours and shifts for the following week were cut, just for pointing out the illegal actions of the boss. There is a lot more to say about the labor conditions there, and those that are pervasive in the food service industry. Whether it’s sexual harassment, food safety violations or retaliation in the workplace, food service workers are constantly faced with petty tyrant bosses, and systematic disempowerment and abuse from management. Until recently, Gee was terrified to speak up publicly about the abuses, because she is a non-permanent resident of the United States, and, in order to stay here, she has to reapply for her visa every few years. In the age of Trump, she feared her employer would be able to influence whether or not she could stay. There were other abuses too, of a personal nature that I have promised not to elaborate on. Fortunately for Gee, her situation has changed for the better.
Long after my tea had gone cold, intently listening to Gee talk about her working conditions, with her showing me her pay stubs, emails and clockings, we discussed what to do next. We talked about the various labor law violations, whether or not to take it public, and what we could do immediately to help her situation. For the time being, she didn’t feel comfortable coming forward publicly. I walked her through the hiring process at my company, helped her get and prepare for an interview with our hiring manager. Then I asked some trusted friends about what to do next. I decided to contact a school board member I know about the horrific labor and food safety conditions, and I am happy to say the school district has chosen to go with a different pizza vendor.
This story does have a happy ending. Gee was hired at my company a little more than a year ago, in the food service sector. She works in the fresh cut department, where she has thrived. Sure, she works in a refrigerator, doing tedious, repetitive work, but labor laws are observed. She gets her breaks, her wages are not stolen, she has predictable schedules, she works in a safe, clean, and harassment-free workplace. She has good health insurance for the first time in her adult life. This year, she’s going to be able to take the first paid vacation. She has access to paid sick days, a weekly hours minimum guarantee and a team that values her humanity. When she points out a food safety or workplace safety hazard, she is not punished, she is rewarded. She also has two shop stewards that make sure her rights are not violated.
Why the stark difference in workplace culture? Well, for one, Gee now is protected by a collective bargaining agreement and a strong union to help enforce it. A few weeks ago, she was promoted to be a department head. She’s now making $18 an hour, with good benefits, paid vacations, sick time, and a defined benefit pension plan. The job duties she has now are not all that different from those she had at Cenario’s. She is responsible for keeping her workplace clean, preparing perishable food for immediate consumption, and making sure everything is done safely for workers and consumers.
Today, I asked her what it was like making $18 an hour for the first time. She told me it was as if a great anxiety has been lifted from her shoulders. She knows for the first time ever that so long as she does her job at work, she can be a self-sustaining human being. The personal dignity in knowing that you can make rent at the end of the month and have enough left over to buy some groceries. When I started making $15 an hour, I had a similar feeling. It’s hard to describe that liberating feeling. That moment someone gets the slightest bit of economic security.
In the coming weeks and months, the city council will be considering applications for cannabis dispensaries in town. We as a community, through the city council, have an opportunity to make sure the workers at these dispensaries have the union experience, where they are valued, compensated fairly, and humanized as people through the power of an enforceable collective bargaining agreement. Some applicants have a history of negotiating in good faith and signing collective bargaining agreements, others not so much. These jobs can be jobs like Gee’s, where workers are treated humanely, or these can be jobs where workers can be horribly exploited. This is particularly important for an emerging industry, where labor laws often exist in legal gray areas, and employees are often those with drug-related offenses on their records, are immigrants, or are otherwise disenfranchised from legal protections. Unions can and should bridge that gap.
Please remember to be kind to the people who prepare your food, check you out at the grocery store, bag your groceries, and coming soon… your dispensary workers. They will return your kindness and respect tenfold.
Sean Raycraft is a lifelong Davis resident and proud Shop Steward with UFCW 8
There are many startling accusations in this article that are definately going to hurt the business owner and his business. I hope they were totally substantiated.
Was the business owner contacted?
Sean assured me that he could prove everything in this piece, so I will leave it to him to respond.
Was the owner talked to? Did anyone get his take?
It’s not just the working violation accusations, but the accusation “that pizza toppings were kept at high temperatures for extended periods of time” is going to scare people away from eating there. I know I used to sometimes get takeout from there, but no more. So he’s already lost at least one customer.
Two . . . probably hundreds.
No, I did not talk to the owner. I talked to his workers though.
I’m wondering if Sean helped Gee report the labor violations and if she received the back pay due to her from the forced clocking out and missed breaks?
I know Sean is a big fan of unions, but there are plenty of non union restaurants that take good care of their employees (and many will be giving raises to the back of the house crew due to a new law).
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20180416/NEWS/180419793
Hi Ken. I talked with Gee about going to the department of labor, and getting her someone to take her case. She was terrified at the prospect of losing her immigration status, and didnt want to get involved with any legal process at the time. I agree there are a lot of restaurants where employers take care of their people and treat them with dignity. In n Out is a pretty good example. Sadly I feel those cases are the exception rather than the rule.
This is a classic tale of working for an employer. The base floor for working conditions by which all workplaces can be judged is established by union contracts. So, yes, there are good employers who are not unionized but they can be evaluated in reference to a unionized version of their business. There may even be businesses that surpass unionized workplaces in terms of total compensation and working conditions, but those will be very unusual. This is the basis of so-called prevailing wage riders for expenditure of public tax dollars in publicly financed projects. It’s a damn good idea because the work for establishing decency in the workplace has already been done by a union and employer. No extra work rules or complicated bureaucratic rule-making is needed.
Thank you, Sean.
This sounds like a classic tale of working for a “BAD” employer (I only know one person that had religious beliefs pushed on them by a boss). It is not “unusual” for the non union jobs to have better pay and benefits since with rare exceptions (like NFL player) almost all the high paying jobs with great benifits in America are non union.
If you include undocumented workers only about one out 0f twenty private sector workers are in a union and while most unions pay a “decent” wage not many pay in the top 25% (a friend was getting tired of the Silicon Valley programer dude culture and looked in to a union job and said he laughed out loud when he saw that public sector union software and IT jobs paid less than half what he was making in the private sector).
Ken, that may be true of the IT sector, but take construction, retail, food service, or entertainment. There is an enormous union difference in those industries. The guy who does my job at Walmart in California probably makes around 14 an hour, has huge insurance premiums and has little dignity at work.
This isn’t an isolated incident, this owner has been doing this for years.
Any idea why someone does not get videos of the guy:
“telling them to clock out”
“participate in his religious events”
or “work without a break”?
If he really has been “doing this for years” it sounds like we should have a lot of former employees getting big settlements from the guy.
Im not a lawyer or an investigator, but I did talk to other folks who work there or have worked there over the years. Gee’s story is hardly isolated.
Craig Ross, how do you know this?
People talk.
True… too bad people didn’t ACT (by talking/writing to the proper authorities)… might have prevented the continuation…
This immigration status thing… if an employer knows they have that “lever”, they can go their merry way… knew of a contractor who would anonymously call INS right before Friday pay-day… improved his profit margins greatly… did it for years… but no-one acted… but “people talked” (1970’s)…
For a moment… forget about wages… forget about workplace abuses…
If the info is legit, has County Public Health been called out to inspect, fine, and of shut this place down for the food safety issues? That has the potential for seriously affecting many more perople than the workers!
Ok… we NOW can go back to wages, and other workplace abuses…
Besides Co PH, the landlord should be copied with the link to this column… as well as adjacent tenants…
> has County Public Health been called out to inspect, fine, and of shut this place down for the food safety issues?
They may not need to.
I’m not into the union thing, but if these allegations are true, and you make one compelling case and display ample confidence to stand by it, then I admire your courage in taking on the business full force, and I hope to see an empty space soon in the row of businesses west of the Covell Nugget. Too bad, I rather liked their pizza, if a bit cheesy.
Reminds me of sexual harassment, vocalized antisemitism, and employee mistreatment accusations of one downtown business owner . . . I stopped eating there many years ago, but they thrive and have expanded nonetheless. Darn. (If you recognize yourself, then the foo sh*ts, wear it)
Alan… thought you suggested folk name names… another thread… I may well be wrong…
Let’s chase out the vermin… [and, indeed (or, in deed), they are]
> Alan… thought you suggested folk name names… another thread… I may well be wrong…
I would if it happened to me, but I’m not naming names of allegations I can’t prove. When several women tell me the same story about the owner over a period of years, I believe . . . plenty of words on the wiki, but apparently popular enough among those that don’t go online that it hasn’t hurt them. Not sure the allegations go beyond antisemite arse creepazoid to legally prosecutable definitions, which may be why no one named names.
My previous call to name names was said in jest and in quite a different context.
Noted… fully understood… respected…
Still, folk should be encouraged to speak out… otherwise, the vermin run rampant… c–kroaches thrive ‘in the dark’…
Just saying… if a problem is not spoken of, why should anyone think it can be solved ? [generically, not posited to you, Alan]
“if a problem is not spoken of, why should anyone think it can be solved “
I have heard some of the same rumors, possibly about the same establishment given the emphasis on antisemitism. My take on this is that the people who have the greatest opportunity to observe are frequently the employees, who also often happen to be students, who are not thinking in terms of solving the problem, but rather just maintaining their jobs in a place that will accommodate their school schedule.
I can vouch for the fear of losing one’s job ( or in my case, one’s career) by reporting sexual harassment. I would not have reported had I not had a supportive friend on the same rotation who said that she would stand with me if there was retaliation. There wasn’t and my case was handled fairly, but I didn’t know that going into the situation.
You have explained why an individual hestitates/fails to act… got it (knew it all along… you didn’t open any eye)… my point is, neither I or the ‘Great Carnac’ (much less society) can deal with issues that are not publicly addressed and documented…
You explanation leaves me with less, not more, empathy for ‘victims’ who don’t speak out… if they don’t bother, why should I?
There are, after all, protections to let folk raise issues anonymously…
Has anyone called Cenario’s to see how pizza sales are going today?