IB/CTB Workers’ Forum Reveals Rampant Racism
By: Ib Ctb Workers
Tags: Workers Rights, Racism, White Supremacy, Bagels

Friday’s inaugural IB/CTB worker community forum was filled with current workers, former workers, and customers corroborating fears over rising COVID case numbers and the owners’ incomplete (but improving) measures to protect staff and clientele.

But another theme quickly emerged: a consistent thread of workplace racism, where people of color employed by CTB have suffered profiling, verbal abuse, wage theft, unexplained firings and layoffs, and more at the hands of our management team. That is what this post will be about, and at the end, we’ll add some basic steps the owners should take to begin addressing it. This summary is not comprehensive, and we encourage any current or former employees who have experienced or witnessed racism and other forms of unequal treatment at work to contact IBCTBWorkersUnited@gmail.com.

Near the beginning of the call, a former Meadow St. worker named Ray recounted their experience being profiled by Mimi Mehaffey, one of the owners. “I had found out that Mimi had told this manager to watch a suspicious black man with a skateboard while I was just being a customer in the store, getting some baked goods,” Ray began. “She said that I looked like I was going to steal. Mind you, I had been working for Mimi. Mimi actually was there for my orientation, made a comment to me about smoking, and still did not recognize me enough to not profile me in the store that I worked at, that everybody else knew me at… I had felt uncomfortable every time I interacted with upper management, including [Meadow St. manager] Todd. They just spoke to me in a very demeaning way.”

Ray also encouraged those of us employed by CTB to research possible wage theft. “I experienced this extreme [tip] loss. It was almost a hundred dollar loss in tips. And then come to find out a manager that was working there… got a super huge increase in their tips. And they actually asked the managers where it came from and their manager said that they had a good week. That same week, I lost a substantial amount of money in my paycheck.”

After getting frustrated with the treatment management subjected them to, Ray began reaching out to other workers, many of whom shared their experiences. “Most of the people I talked to that were having significant problems, but just kind of let it go until they got fired or they quit because they couldn’t take it anymore — were people of color,” they noted. Ray and their coworkers reported incidents to company HR, but the treatment didn’t change, and other Black workers continued to be mistreated.

Sheena, CTB’s former downtown night supervisor and bakery coordinator, and a Black mother who spent 4 years working for IB/CTB, echoed Ray’s experiences. “It’s really heartbreaking right now to hear all these things,” she told the crowd, “and especially the way that Ray was treated. Like I said, [Ray] is not the first one who’s been on the sandwich unit to be treated like that. The first person of color to be profiled in the store or just to be talked down to because you are a minority.”

“It’s just crazy to hear everything that’s going on because it’s just showing how much discrimination happened towards me and myself. The things that Ray said are all true. And I dealt with it for four years. It’s true. I’ve seen many of people of color come in and out of there and be treated like crap, and come to me because I’m one of the only people of color who worked there. Mind you, I was a supervisor the whole time… I’m like, ‘Try and brush it off. If it’s really getting bad, then you have to go to someone higher because they don’t listen to me.’ So it’s just, it’s heartbreaking.”

A particular focus of the discussion on workplace racism was the inconsistent handling of COVID layoffs. Initially, the owners indicated that we would have a choice in whether to get laid off as a result of the pandemic, ostensibly to allow workers to decide our own health and financial risk tolerance. However, CTB did not follow through on this promise when it came to Black workers.

After 4 years of service, Sheena was suddenly dismissed one morning in June for a COVID layoff that she never consented to, and was still made to work the rest of the day. Eventually, Ray too was mysteriously pushed out through cuts in hours, last-minute shift changes, and store transfers — and noted that this is still happening to Black workers: “I actually found out that one of the workers there… has been with the company for, I want to say 10 years. They just [this week] got laid off without any explanation.” Several former workers recounted having serious problems getting CTB to pay out their PTO upon getting laid off, having to send several emails over a period of weeks to be paid.

When Ray confronted management about workplace racism during their tenure, they say management “very much overcompensated, saying Mimi is best friends with X, Y, Z, black token, whatever. And they literally could not come up with an example for me where the person that is of color getting fired, had any real reason to get fired.”

White employees, in contrast, reported little to no trouble getting their COVID layoff preferences followed — and when they did run into trouble, it was a different kind. One of Sheena’s white coworkers from her store even revealed that they’d requested a layoff around the same time — and had been denied.

“They weren’t giving anyone any hazard pay,” the worker explained. “And I was like, well, can you give me more hours? And [Mimi] said, no. And I was like, can you lay me off? And she said, no. At that time they had been taking volunteers to be laid off — it was really weird to me that I wasn’t allowed. And then a few days after I had asked, other were still getting laid off from our store. It was really weird.”

“They really don’t treat the employees the way they should,” Sheena told the group. “Because like I said, I was put on COVID relief. I was told on Saturday not to come back to work on Monday. For no reason! I was really upset that day at work, and they still made me stay in work… It made me upset because I worked hard for this company.”

With a further round of COVID layoffs about to occur in the next week, it’s clear that IB/CTB cannot continue with their past layoff practices and protocols. Upcoming layoffs must be fully transparent with regards to how they are decided and carried out — where there is inconsistency and secrecy, there is discrimination, and any injustice to one is an injustice to all.

Is the upcoming layoff round just a furlough for employees of stores that are closing for the holidays? Will everyone be recalled? Are other workers being laid off permanently? Without the necessary communication, we won’t find out until it’s too late. The issue with providing zero transparency or consistency to how these decisions are made isn’t just that it leads to racism and other forms of discrimination — it also makes those patterns exponentially more difficult to track.

Transparency and consistency advance the interests of every single employee of IB & CTB. None of us benefit from a climate of surprise job losses, but Black workers are hit the hardest by it. The owners need to acknowledge these issues for what they are — not laugh them off like Mimi and Gregor did when confronted by protesters on Sunday. If they are serious about reversing discriminatory trends, we want to be clear that we expect every single furloughed worker to be recalled once the stores reopen — and that we will be auditing the process ourselves, and publicly discussing the results. It is up to the owners how that discussion will look.