In the six years he spent working at McDonald’s restaurants in San Francisco, Jose Ramirez thought he had seen it all. Customers swearing over missing packets of sauce, flinging food trays over order mistakes, punching doors and windows after being asked to leave.
But the former employee never expected to witness an actual homicide.
That happened in February 2016, when an unidentified assailant shot the passenger of a car leaving the McDonald’s parking lot in the Fillmore District — right across the street from a police substation.
The victim exited the car through the driver’s side door and made it a few steps before collapsing on the sidewalk, about 12 feet from where Ramirez said he hid under a table inside the restaurant as he tried to count the number of gunshots.
“Someone died so close to me, and I feared for my own life that day,” Ramirez, now 36, told The Chronicle through a Spanish translator. “We all took cover. It was terrifying.”
Fast-food employees are no stranger to shifts that test their ability to respond to crises. TikTok was abuzz last month with videos of drive-through employees at a Jack in the Box in Moreno Valley throwing drinks at a belligerent customer. Outside of a Carl’s Jr. in San Bernardino County, an employee found the body of an unhoused man in January. And that same month at a Burger King in Milwaukee, one employee accidentally shot and killed his teenage coworker while trying to defend against an alleged robbery.
In San Francisco and across California, 911 call data shows fast-food workers regularly face disruptive and sometimes volatile situations, ranging from noise complaints and trespassing to assaults and armed robberies.
A nonprofit labor organization focused on raising the minimum wage analyzed 911 calls to make the case that fast-food companies should do more to protect employees. The Chronicle’s analysis of the data, along with federal labor statistics and additional research, shows that what happens in these restaurants often reflects neglected needs of communities — forcing fast-food employees to deal with some of society’s most dire issues.
Petra Reynaga and her mother Maria Hernadez protest outside of a San Francisco McDonald’s on Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022. Research shows that fast-food workers are younger, more likely to come from Latino communities and make less money than other California workers. They’re also more likely to experience injuries than full-service restaurant workers, according tofederal Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Samantha Laurey/The ChronicleCalls for help
While much of the research related to these restaurants concerns the health effects of consuming fast foods, the Fight for $15 labor campaign that started in New York City sought to make a case about the social impact of working in such businesses.
The group studied 911 call data for locations of four well-known fast-food chains in nine major California cities. Its analysis showed San Francisco as having the highest rate of calls related to violent or potentially violent incidents in recent years — despite having the fewest fast-food restaurant locations included in the dataset.
Fight for $15 shared its data with The Chronicle, which conducted an independent analysis that categorized “violent incidents” differently, including only calls that fall under crime categories the FBI considers violent. Reported incidents from the call data don’t mean someone was arrested for or convicted of a crime.
The largest category of calls for the entire subset of restaurant locations was disturbance, which, according to the nonprofit’s categorization, include a “wide variety of disruptive and threatening activities,” such as narcotic activity, indecent exposure, public intoxication, disputes between people, refusal to leave a property and screaming.
In cities with high call rates, there tends to be a small set of “problem locations” with an exceptional number of calls, the report said. Several of those locations generate multiple 911 calls a week. The Fillmore McDonald’s, which belongs to a Census tract with a poverty rate above 30%, is among those locations. It generated more than 900 calls between 2017 and 2020, about a third of which were related to allegedly violent incidents.
The San Francisco Police Department declined The Chronicle’s requests for an interview, saying no one was specifically in charge of incidents at fast-food restaurants, and ignored follow-up questions.
About two miles from the Fillmore location, the Market Street McDonald’s restaurant had the third highest call volume between 2017 and 2020 among the San Francisco restaurants included in the study. There, Leydi Garma, 48, said she faced numerous scary moments as a worker.
One involved a person who returned to the restaurant after being asked to stay away for unruly behavior. Garma said the person screamed and threw a “wet floor” sign at her and her coworkers before the manager intervened.
“We locked the door for a few hours because we were afraid the person was still outside,” Garma said. “Luckily, they left.”
The restaurant has no security guard, which Fight for $15 cited as a recurring problem for fast-food restaurants with high incident rates.
McDonald’s, where four people interviewed by The Chronicle worked, didn’t respond to questions about providing security guards to troubled locations, but said the chain has “rigorous safety and security procedures in place.”
“Restaurant managers and crew at McDonald’s corporate-owned restaurants undergo full training including a comprehensive workplace violence prevention program on safety and security practices, and we provide the same resources to franchisees to support their teams,” Rob Holm, director of McDonald’s Global Security, said in an email.
Holm added the restaurants use video surveillance and armored car cash pickups, and train their employees to keep the back doors closed. At the Fillmore location, for instance, Holm said the lobby closes at 10 p.m. to “prioritize the safety of our employees.”
Peter Ou, the owner and operator of the Market Street McDonald’s, said via email that all employees receive workplace violence prevention training online and in-person, and are instructed to call 911 in any violent situation.
The Fight for $15 report, which was compiled by researchers from UC Berkeley and UCLA, contends that calling 911 is an inadequate recourse for complex societal problems.
“When police are called to resolve low-priority issues like noise complaints, or noncriminal matters involving substance abuse, homelessness or mental health crises — matters for which they often lack the proper training — the results can be disastrous,” the report said, pointing to research that shows the disproportionate impact of police use of force on Black Californians.
“Many of the incidents reported in both the worker accounts and the data involve either spontaneous bursts of aggression that may be more effectively deterred or deescalated by the presence of an on-site security officer, or behavioral health crises better suited to a social worker or mental health professional,” the report also said.
The median age of fast-food workers in 2020 was about 22, compared with 43 for security guards, 42 for social workers and 41 for mental-health counselors — occupations that would typically be involved in helping people in crisis, according to federal labor data.
The franchise business model that dominates the fast-food industry creates a layer of separation between workers and parties responsible for working conditions, a recent UCLA study states.
The franchisor — or the corporate company — is not liable for what happens at individual sites, noted Saba Waheed, research director at the UCLA Labor Center and lead author of the study, exacerbating the question of who is ultimately responsible for worker welfare and safety.
“The rules are very individualized from location to location,” Waheed said. “And that puts it back on the workers to have to face and address the issues.”
Ramirez said he and his coworkers were expected to continue working following the February 2016 shooting outside the Fillmore restaurant. “Taking time off to deal with what happened was nonexistent,” he said.
McDonald’s said the allegations by Ramirez “are disappointing and do not reflect the safe working environment of McDonald’s.”
Fight for $15 has thrown its weight behind AB 257, which would give fast-food workers a seat at the table in deciding the industry’s workplace standards and safety regulations. The bill passed the state Assembly on Jan. 31 and is now before the Senate. If passed, California could become the first state in the nation to convene a council on which fast-food employees have a say about worker protections.
Local governments do have the ability to enact zoning restrictions limiting where fast-food restaurants can operate. For instance, San Francisco neighborhoods such as Hayes Valley, Chinatown and North Beach currently ban chain restaurants from opening.
Even so, San Francisco, a dense metropolitan peninsula battling a deadly opioid epidemic and crippling housing affordability problems, has more fast-food restaurants per person (1.5 per 1,000) than most other California counties, U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows. That ratio was the second highest in the state, trailing Mono County.
Many of the restaurants are concentrated in downtown neighborhoods where the effects of poverty, food insecurity and homelessness are more pronounced, while higher-income neighborhoods like the Outer Sunset have few fast-food franchises.
Under-resourced neighborhoods tend to rely more on fast food as a source of nourishment — and possibly as a “third place” where people go that isn’t home or work, said Catherine Keske, an economist and social scientist at UC Merced.
For Ramirez, the pressures of working in a third place mutated with a global health crisis.
Jose Ramirez said he witnessed a fatal shooting while working at a McDonald’s restaurant in the Fillmore neighborhood in 2016. Photographed Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022 in San Francisco, Calif.
Brontë Wittpenn/The ChronicleThe pandemic’s toll
Ramirez, who immigrated from El Salvador nearly 20 years ago, first got a job at the Fillmore McDonald’s in 2016. He had worked in the fast-food industry for four years by then, and odd construction jobs before that. At McDonald’s, he applied to be a cashier but said he was mostly given janitorial duties — sweeping, mopping, cleaning the restroom and taking out the garbage.
He said he was grateful for the job, but the unpredictable encounters with customers experiencing mental health issues began to wear on his own mental health.
“Every other day, there was some kind of tense exchange,” Ramirez recalled.
He requested a transfer and, by January 2019, was working at a McDonald’s in the Bayview. He was still there two years later, when he contracted COVID-19 and took two weeks off in January to recuperate. He alleges he wasn’t paid for those weeks, saying he was told upon his return that expanded access to sick leave during the pandemic was expired at the time.
While the first round of supplemental sick pay did expire at the end of September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill reinstating the pandemic benefits in February and made them retroactive to Jan. 1, before Ramirez took time off. Ramirez said he was fired in February and has since filed a complaint with the California Department of Labor Standards, asking for back pay and to be rehired.
McDonald’s said it was company policy not to comment on personnel matters.
The pandemic exacerbated issues faced by fast-food workers, according to a UCLA study released in January. The study found almost two-thirds of the roughly 430 Los Angeles County fast-food workers researchers heard from experienced wage theft such as “being paid late or unpaid overtime rates, denied meal breaks or reimbursement for uniforms or equipment” between June and October 2021. They also reported insufficient hours to make ends meet, and well over half reported health and safety hazards on the job, amounting to injuries for 43% of workers.
Waheed, of the UCLA Labor Center, said workers enforcing COVID mandates such as asking customers to wear masks or to observe physical distancing requirements reported having some kind of negative interaction.
“Half of the fast-food workers we surveyed also experienced verbal abuse, and over a third experienced violence such as threats, racial slurs and even assault,” she said. “And this is on top of dealing with wage theft, insufficient hours and other health and safety hazards.”
As for Ramirez, who said the 2016 shooting wasn’t the only one he witnessed while working at the Fillmore McDonald’s, he’s still looking for his next job. He often visits his former workplace where his partner still works. He said he worries about her safety.
“When I know she’s working, I’m constantly thinking that something could happen, that a shooting can happen at any moment,” he said. “It makes me uncomfortable and fearful thinking that she’s there. I don’t want fast-food workers to keep experiencing that violence. I don’t wish that upon anyone.”
The Chronicle obtained and independently analyzed data compiled by the nonprofit group Fight for $15 and a Union. The group requested and obtained 911 call data for the restaurant locations of four well known fast-food chains in nine major California cities between 2017 and 2020 from local police departments. The list of restaurants in this study does not include restaurants that are located inside other business establishments. For example, a McDonald’s restaurant inside of a Walmart would not be included. Read more about its methodology and limitations here.
Data summary:
Franchises included in the study: McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Burger King and Carl’s Jr.
California cities included in the study: Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose and Stockton
Restaurant locations analyzed: 643
Calls analyzed: 77,219
The authors of the study categorized the calls into nine incident categories based on their recorded descriptions: alarm, assault, criminal damage to property, criminal trespass, disturbance, sexual assault or other sex crime, theft, threat and other. These categories do not imply that charges have been filed or that anyone has been found guilty in court. Those nine categories are further split into two types: those that the study authors deemed were violent or potentially violent, and those that are not.
The Chronicle took a different approach to determining violent versus nonviolent incidents, following the statutory definition of violent crime. We categorized assault, sex crimes and threat as violent and everything else as non-violent. Violent crimes are offenses that involve force or threat of force, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program.
The authors of the study cautioned against the data’s limitations, some of which stem from imperfect and incomplete record-keeping practices by police departments and varying formats the data came in, as well as human errors.
Shwanika Narayan and Yoohyun Jung are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: shwanika.n[email protected], [email protected]; Twitter: @shwanika, @yoohyun_jung
