El Dorado Hills Taco Bell employees strike over alleged discrimination by manager
Employees at an El Dorado Hills fast food restaurant went on a one-day strike, after a manager reportedly flung insults and acted unprofessionally to Latino workers.
Alongside a state workers’ union and a nonprofit civil rights legal group, staff members at the El Dorado Hills Taco Bell demonstrated outside the store on Monday, Feb. 9. One of the striking employees, Gabriela Flores Carpio, said she and coworker Isabel Borges Ramirez experienced various vulgarities and racist remarks by a manager. She also said they were physically injured as a result of one incident.
Carpio said the manager was initially kind and professional when he started working at the restaurant last summer. However, she said after around a month, the manager reportedly began yelling at employees and calling staff members who did not speak English “stupid.”
“(The manager) crudely expressed no interest in speaking with me,” said Carpio, who only speaks Spanish. “(He indicated) that I was dumb if I didn’t speak English, and why bother wasting time with me?”
In a separate incident, Carpio said she had hot frying oil splashed onto her hands when the manager snatched a frying basket from her and quickly lowered it into the deep fryer. Another time, Carpio said she saw the manager punch a wall and start bleeding after yelling at her and Ramirez.
The two employees tried sharing concerns about their boss with another manager and the company’s human resources department, but they said nothing changed.
“Truthfully, everyone felt scared of (the manager),” Carpio said. “During that last incident, I felt too scared to say anything ... That’s when I told (a friend) about what I was experiencing.”
Carpio said her friend passed along the phone number for a workers union that could help the Taco Bell employees pursue further action. In a Facebook post on the day of the worker strike, the California Fast Food Workers Union said it was supporting the restaurant’s employees.
“We’re often terrified to go to work, the bosses, like many in the industry, want us to feel worthless and helpless,” the union’s post read. “We won’t tolerate this abuse and violence. We demand Taco Bell take steps to protect workers from violence and abuse.”
The union connected Carpio and Ramirez with Legal Aid at Work, a nonprofit organization offering pro bono legal services to low-income Californians and employees across the state.
Milo Inglehart, a civil rights attorney and the program director of Legal Aid at Work’s Gender Equity and LGBTQ Rights Program, is working on the employees’ case. He said in situations like Carpio and Ramirez’s, the organization works with the state’s civil rights office while simultaneously trying to work with the company itself to avoid legal action.
According to Inglehart, the nonprofit has filed complaints against on behalf of Carpio and Ramirez with the California Civil Rights Department. The attorney said he hopes to come to some sort of resolution with Taco Bell and the El Dorado Hills restaurant’s franchise operator.
J. A. Sutherland, based in Northern California, runs numerous Taco Bell eateries in the region, including the El Dorado Hills location.
“It’s encouraging to see that workers are organizing, that workers are coming together on their own to fight back (against workplace violations),” Inglehart said. “We’re very happy that we can support those actions and support people fighting to make sure that they have a safe and respectful place to work.”
Carpio said having the workers union and Legal Aid at Work at their side during the strike helped the employees feel safer while they spoke out against the treatment they faced.
“We felt better because we raised our voices so we could be heard and not stay quiet,” she said.
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