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Brown Bag Seafood paying employees for 'lost hours'

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March 17, 2020

Brown Bag Seafood, a seven-unit chain based in Chicago, is ensuring that all of its employees take home paychecks over during the two-week shutdown of Illinois restaurants. The chain has enacted a policy that commits to paying workers 70% of their "lost" hours as a result of COVID-19-related circumstances.

"We agree with and respect the governor's leadership in his decision to shut down dining in at restaurants, but the lack of any concrete details of how the government plans to support all of the affected workers in our industry is disappointing," CEO Donna Lee said in the release. "In the meantime, we have crew members that need and deserve answers for how their livelihood is going to be maintained, and we felt we needed to step up and swiftly act."

Lost hours include any and all time spent away from work for any reason: not only the time an employee spends away from work caring for him or herself, affected family members, or children home from school, but also the time reduced from the employee's normal working schedule as a result of business slowdown over the next two weeks.

The policy, which was announced company-wide and went into effect Monday, put Brown Bag's roughly 75 hourly employees at considerably more ease in this uncertain time, Lee said.

Two of Brown Bag's restaurants — its locations at Revival Food Hall and Hayden Hall — were closed outright, immediately erasing scheduled hours for a dozen of its workers. Now, as an example, an employee who typically worked a 40-hour workweek at one of these locations will be paid out for 28 hours this week, despite not working.

"We realized pretty quickly that the absolute most pressing concern for our staff right now was not that they were sick and couldn't work, but that they were healthy and wouldn't have any hours to be given," Chief Strategy Officer Zach Flanzman said. He said the company's Brown Bag's overall revenue to be down by more than 50% over the shutdown period. "Just because suddenly business around here feels like it's at a standstill doesn't mean our employee's lives come to a standstill, too. Rent is still due, families still need to be cared for."

Lee said she expects some employees will elect not to work over the coming weeks due to personally feeling at risk or caring for children or others, and that these individuals would also be compensated for their "lost" hours. She based much of her decision to keep all of her locations outside of food halls open was also made with her workforce in mind.

"Most of our people do want to continue working, and as long as they are healthy, we want to afford them that ability as much as possible," she said. "There are restaurants where we believe we'd be financially a little better off to just close outright during this shutdown period, but if we can keep a few more hours on the schedule for our teams, that's worth it right now. We've always told our teams that they are our number one priority; now is the time that actions speak louder than words."

In addition, Brown Bag has taken a variety of precautions as of last week and this weekend to ensure the health and safety of its staff and guests, from requiring all employees to wear gloves at all times to upping the frequency and thoroughness of its cleaning and sanitation protocols, according to the release.

Brown Bag is also offering free delivery on all online orders and introducing the "Brown Bag Care Package," a family-sized meal of guest favorites including the Lobster Roll with Truffle-Parm Tots and the Grilled Salmon Powerbox.

Read all coronavirus coverage on FastCasual.