Sonoma County hospitality businesses grapple with employee activism
The recent brouhaha at Girl & the Fig restaurant in Sonoma after a server who angrily quit over wanting to wear a Black Lives Matter mask as part of her uniform reverberated through the local hospitality sector.
Owners walk a tightrope with a younger workforce and a deeply politicized society grappling with social change and the demand for racial equity. They don’t want to hurt staff morale, while knowing a misstep by an employee on the job can become social media fodder and quickly cause an uproar harmful to a company’s reputation.
The stakes are particularly high because hospitality operators, from restaurants to winery tasting rooms to hotels, are a major driver of the Sonoma County economy, taking in over $2 billion a year in consumer spending.
The incident at the popular Sonoma eatery is not isolated to the county. After much internal and external consternation, Starbucks last year reversed course and allowed employees to wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts and pins. Earlier this month, a federal judge tossed a lawsuit against Whole Foods over claims the grocery chain illegally retaliated against employees who wore Black Lives Matter masks in the workplace.
While some local businesses inside and outside the hospitality arena were reticent about talking publicly about the thorny matter of acceptable workplace clothing and masks, the topic can’t be avoided, brand and corporate crisis communications experts said.
Restaurants and retailers must be proactive in communicating to employees a policy on mask wearing and work attire, experts said, and if they have strong support for a social movement, they should let it be known in an appropriate way to workers and customers. Many food, drink and retail operators updated such uniform policies last year, as facial coverings took hold in the pandemic and after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis policy custody in May ignited a firestorm of racial injustice protests nationwide.
“I believe that employees want to be proud of the organizations they work for,” said Jacinta Gauda, the principal at the New York corporate communications firm The Gauda Group at Grayling.
“And sometimes social movements actually give us a larger sense of purpose and many customers can connect with that larger sense of purpose.”
Healdsburg chef and restaurateur Dustin Valette began addressing uniform policy rules in 2016 during the heated presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He reiterates those standards with every new hire at his Valette restaurant. Although he personally supports Black Lives Matter 100%, he said, his serving staff is required to wear jeans and a black shirt. During the ongoing pandemic, plain black masks were added to the uniform.
“We're not in a position at a restaurant to try to alienate any single person or group. We are here for everybody,” Valette said.
He takes pride that his restaurant is accessible to those from a wide socioeconomic range, in a town in the heart of Wine Country increasingly visited by luxury worldwide travelers. He recalled a recent evening when a billionaire dined near a janitor.
“They can enjoy themselves exactly the same,” Valette said of his patrons of diverse backgrounds. “To me, that is the truest, most essential part of our business and the main part makes me the happiest.”
The Farmhouse Inn in Forestville gives a mask with its logo on it to employees, and also allows them to wear either a black or khaki face covering. The luxury inn, where suites start at $575 a night, has a uniform code that even covers the display of tattoos, though it never has never to enforce that part, owner Joe Bartolomei said.
“At the end of the day, our (employee) handbook is what we go back to, if you need to enforce something,” Bartolomei said.
Some of his workers are passionate about social causes, citing the bumper sticker on their cars in the employee parking lot. The Farmhouse Inn also serves guests from Southern states who are likely to be more conservative than the progressive nature of Sonoma County.
“I would never want to ask an employee to compromise their values,” Bartolomei said, and he would not want to “put a guest of mine in an awkward position either.”
He has found that it is best for employees to avoid any discussion of politics at the inn. “If a guest is talking politics, we don’t engage,” he said.
Earlier this month, the highly regarded Girl & The Fig restaurant was forced to close for a week amid social media furor when former server, Kimberly Stout, posted a video on Instagram on Jan. 1 of her leaving her last day on the job Sept. 3, 2020. She declared she quit after being told she could not wear her Black Lives Matter mask. Stout’s post quickly went viral, garnering harsh comments and getting picked up by national and international media.
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