Just after noon on Wednesday, June 3, storm clouds gathered along a busy commercial corridor in Ridley Township, Delaware County.
It was no ordinary summer squall.
A violent line of thunderstorms — known as a “derecho” — was about to sweep through the region, ultimately producing 75-mile-per-hour gales, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, and causing at least three deaths.
Inside a Chick-fil-A franchise — wedged between a car-parts store and a pizza joint — employees watched the skies darken and the winds build. As is custom during bad weather, managers called in five employees who’d been outside taking drive-thru orders on iPads and directing traffic.
Then, without explanation, one of the highest-ranking managers on-site ordered a Black male employee into the parking lot.
The employee stood alone outside as the storm approached, waving cars through the narrow lane that circles the store. When other managers spotted a bolt of lightning and asked that the employee be called back inside, Jason Ontjes, the manager who’d made the decision, refused.
“No one cares if [he] dies, right,” said Ontjes, the senior director of operations at the Ridley Chick-Fil-A and another location in nearby Springfield, according to accounts from three employee witnesses.
Standing nearby, Richard Lacontora, director of training at the same pair of Chick-Fil-A franchises, chimed in.
“Yeah, he looks like a protester,” Lacontora said, referring to the thousands who’d filled American streets that week to march against police brutality. “He can be out in the rain.”
The comment drew disgusted looks from surrounding employees.
“And I’m not going to apologize, either,” Lacontora continued, according to the witness accounts. “You guys can’t take a joke.”
Lacontora was right on at least one point: The employees couldn’t take it.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, with the country in upheaval, the employees had reached a tipping point. The exchange sparked a worker rebellion.
Within weeks, Lacontora and Ontjes were forced to resign. Soon after, Chick-fil-A fired two other managers — one Black, one white — who questioned whether the franchise responded swiftly or forcefully enough to the incident.
The uprising was organized and executed by a group of young, Black employees, many of them teenagers. Their demands for racial justice in the workplace did not draw the kind of attention paid to powerful news organizations and high-end restaurants, but they are no less telling.
Even in suburban strip malls — where employees are among the youngest and poorest-paid — whispers of mistreatment have led to calls for action. It’s a reckoning that, in this one specific case, hit an industry long known for toxicity among workers and pushed mistreatment into the light through the ubiquity of social media.
“People can only hear you if you’re talking,” said Zaire Cuspud, 20, one of the employees-turned-organizers. “If you’re not talking about it, no one’s gonna know.”
‘Maybe I’m just not good enough’
Cuspud was ready to burst well before the incident on June 3.
He was 16 when he first started at the Chick-fil-A location in Ridley — a high school student eager for a paycheck. He enjoyed the job enough to brush off the occasions when he’d hear managers joke about the way Latinx employees spoke English.
“I would feel like it was wrong, but I didn’t really know why,” said Cuspud, who is Black.
When he was 19, he earned a promotion to a position just below the management level, where he idled for almost two years making $11.50 an hour. When a white employee with less seniority, but who had a personal relationship with the store’s general manager, got promoted ahead of him, Cuspud felt deflated. Sometimes, he said, he’d come to work, head to the bathroom and start sobbing.
“There was a time and a period where I thought maybe I’m just not good enough,” said Cuspud.
Informally, he and other Black employees started to talk about the work environment at the Ridley and Springfield Chick-fil-A locations — how they felt Black employees had to work twice as hard for half the recognition. At the Springfield store, according to one employee, 12 of 15 managers were white as of early July, clearly disproportionate to the overall workforce. Keystone Crossroads tried to reach an HR representative to confirm employee demographics, but did not receive a response.
Both stores are owned by Gene Ontjes, Jason Ontjes’ father, one of the first Chick-fil-A franchisees and a personal acquaintance of chain founder S. Truett Cathy.
Black employees also traded anecdotes about racist and sexist barbs they’d overheard in the workplace.
Miatu Kormah, 19, who is Liberian American, recalled a manager speaking to her in a faux “African” accent. Adonia Johnson, 19, bristled at the managers who demanded she change her red hair color because it didn’t look natural, but made no similar request of white employees, she said. Elisha Abney, 21, thought about how Lacontora would interject odd sexual references into normal conversations. And Zayd Blackwell, 23, noted how Lacontora would frequently comment out loud on the physical appearance of female employees and customers.
Abney and the others wondered if all the “little backhanded comments” they’d heard over the years amounted to a real grievance. If they spoke out, would they be dismissed as angry, Black employees, further inhibiting their job prospects?
Then came the “jokes” in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
“It’s just like, ‘This is enough,’” said Abney.
