Report: Boba Guys Faces Allegations of Sexual Harassment and Racism

Boba Guys, the San Francisco-based tea chain with locations in Los Angeles, New York, and across the Bay Area, is the focus of fresh allegations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment, just weeks after it fired a manager for racist comments allegedly posted to social media in 2018.

This runs counter to the public advocacy of civil rights and social justice, with its support of the Black Lives Matter movement and opposition of police brutality. But employees who spoke out last month say that incident wasn’t isolated.

An excerpt from Eater:

According to former employee Jasmine Fossett, a manager at a New York Boba Guys allegedly told her in 2018 that “Black people start stealing after the first three weeks of working,” at Boba Guys, then reduced her hours when she was critical of those remarks. When she told the company’s SF-based management, she says they apologized but took no further action.

Still others say that when forced to deal with racist customers who attacked workers on the basis of their ethnicity, “we were told we were the problem,” Union Square staffer Tamia Proctor says.

Wen Neale, an employee at a Mission Boba Guys, says “he dealt with a manager who sexually harassed him at work, constantly asking him out on dates when he wasn’t interested,” but his complaints to higher-ups went unanswered. He says that same manager referred to Black and Latino employees as “lazy and half-assed.”

Boba Guys was founded in 2011, and opened its Clinton Street outpost four years later. They’ve reopened post-lockdown, and are serving between noon and 5:00pm daily.