As a Bay Area resident my priorities are the cost of housing, cleaning our dirty streets and alleviating traffic congestion.
This is an example of progressivism gone awry. Solving the basics is incredibly important. Our quality of life is in decline (in the bay area) and this is the best our politicians can do?
I'm enraged.
Ah, but you see, it is also difficult!
"Dirty streets" and "traffic congestion" are big, messy problems, requiring careful planning, managing projects and contractors, adversarial factors, etc.
By contrast, passing laws that apply to corporations is so easy! They are generally law abiding, so you just tell them "no more free food for you!", and they obey.
Until, you know, they skip town and you are left with nothing. But that will likely happen after my tenure in the local legislative body, so my utility horizon is rather shorter term...
Congestion and housing problems solved.
That is not true. The rule applies to all new offices in MTV. The Facebook office just happens to be the first new office that was completed with the intention to provide free food, since the law passed.
(Applying a rule like that to Facebook alone - on what basis, exactly? - would be discriminatory, unusual, and likely unenforceable.)
> The SF rule is on proposal stages and is unlikely to pass.
How do you know that?
It has some serious backers, and similar rules passed in nearby municipalities. What evidence do you have that it will not pass in SF as well?
With more traffic caused by people leaving their campus more than start/end of day, people will need to account for more traffic. This may cause people to move further out or pay more of a premium for housing in close proximity.
If these companies knew ahead of time that this was not allowed, they may not have built their campuses so sprawling or may have avoided these areas altogether.
As far as I understand, the prevailing policy is doing the exact opposite on all those three.
They still get the tech voter and now they will endear some small progressive cause.
But, yes, it's utterly incomprehensible. It's reductionist. Like I said before, ban Uber, ban MUNI, they are taking jobs away from Pedicabs and Taxi drivers...
Anyway, it's not Robots (yet) prepping food at the company canteen, they have to hire workers to do the cooking, serving, etc. So it's more or less a wash. Only diff is probably company cafeterias mostly try to ensure workers have a legal right to work in the US.
It's true that basically all elected officials in SF are Democrats, but in practice there are two semi-official parties: "progressives" and "moderates." The supervisors pushing this, Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí belong to the progressive wing, which recently got a majority on BoS with Rafael Mandelman taking Scott Wiener's old seat.
While pretty much united on national political issues, the two groups differ on housing policy (generally, moderates want to build more, progressives less), homelessness, and the proper attitude toward the tech industry (the progressive wing tends to blame it for many of SF's problems).
I'm sure this shot to the top of the priority list not out of some moral imperative, but because someone somewhere was losing a buck, or could make a buck if this passed.
This is just skimming low hanging fruit and a free distraction from real problems they either cannot fix or don't consider worth their time. plus they win if the "elitist" complain about having to give up their free lunch
I can understand why some are outraged but this is the old adage of, I didn't speak up when they came for the .....
Businesses within the Area paid $7.6 million more in payroll tax in 2013 than they did in 2010. While some increase would be expected because of the economic recovery, the Area generated $7.1 million more in payroll tax than it would have, if it had grown at the same rate as the rest of the city from 2010 to 2013.
Also based on payroll tax filings, there were 61 more businesses in the Area in 2013 than there were in 2010. Again, some increase would be expected, but there were 32 more than there would have been if the number of businesses in the Area grew the same rate as the rest of the city from 2010 to 2013
Taxable sales, which reflect the health of neighborhood-serving retail businesses, grew more slowly in the Area than the rest of the city from 2010 to 2013—a 10% increase as opposed to a 25% increase in the rest of the city. Had taxable sales in the Area grown at the same rate as the rest of the city, an additional $90,000 in sales tax would have been generated.
An examination of trends in commercial rent, residential asking rents, and housing values in the Area revealed that, while increases have been rapid since the exclusion took effect, similarly rapid increases were seen in the rest of the city, and there was no appreciable difference between the Area and the rest of the city in the growth of commercial and residential rents, and housing prices.
On the flip side of your rage are people who run local businesses having to shutdown, so local officials of Mountain View saw a way to respond to this.
But, yeah this is stupid.
As a Bay Area resident this should be par for the course in terms of the stuff coming from the municipal governments in the area.
Except it's actually an example of crony capitalism gone...well, perfectly according to design, actually.
There's nothing even remotely progressive about restricting all other businesses just to boost business for a particular industry.
Whatever it is, it isn't addressing the important basics to improve our quality of life.
This just means the next massive campus complex will not open in Mountain View. Big profitable companies and their hordes of tax paying employees will go elsewhere, and definitely will not be supporting MTV's local businesses.
Welcome to the wonderful world of unintended consequences!
As for lunch, my company only provides it once per week. On the one day we do provide it, it is catered, and thus requires local labor. On the other days, I go out to get it. My favorite sandwich shop just closed; my coworker's favorite Korean place closed with them. If I had to guess, I would suspect they simply couldn't sustain themselves with the rents as they are. Their prices were decent. Other nearby eateries with more of a, for want of a better word, hipster feel to them charge significantly more for less food; I avoid eating there because over the course of the entire year, it represents a non-trivial amount of money. But if it comes to it that they're the only ones that can survive, I'll probably just abandon eating out altogether.
As it is, I'm making plans to abandon SV altogether primarily due to the issues mentioned by your parent: the ever declining quality of life in the Bay Area. Will that be a boon to the local market?
they pay well, better than restaurants, and they have better hours and benefits
So... vote when you can!
I've given money to and advocate for Moderates and I was an elected Hillary Clinton Delegate.
Personally I encourage you to let @AaronPeskin know how you feel on this matter. He is the "progressive" who introduced this nonsense.
Primaries!
Cool, so start-ups lose a potential hiring perk to the incumbents.
(Does anyone know the story behind this bill? Which politicians and restaurants supported it? I’d like to avoid the latter going forward.)
[0] https://sf.eater.com/2018/7/25/17614570/san-francisco-corpor...
1) There are more people in the areas with offices who are around to eat dinner. Therefore, restaurants aren't so dependent on the lunch money of office workers.
2) Restaurant workers can get cheaper rent and therefore restaurants can find staff more easily.
They could just do something similar to what colleges do:
- increase salaries just a bit
- but the increased salary goes to a food card
- employees can't easily turn this into cash
- you swipe it and "pay"
- the company is essentially paying for the employee's food
Money changes hands, but no one is at a net loss than what a free food perk would cost.
It's not about the money.
If it's the former, then I think it's still "free food".
If it's the latter, then it removes much of the benefit of the company providing the meal -- keeping employees on-campus and near their desks longer. I like my company's free food since it's easy to walk down the hall and eat a quick lunch between meetings, no need to take an hour to head off campus to a local restaurant. I don't care that the food is "free", but that it's fast and convenient.
I don't think catering startups that coordinate with local restaurants (e.g ZeroCater and Chewse) will be affected.
On a slightly off topic note, when your company gets to cafeteria size are you really a startup any more?
Awesome idea, thanks!
The problem MV's fixing is the perception that highly-paid tech workers have become a class of their own, isolated from the larger communities in which they live and insulated from negative social consequences in the communities around them. When you get paid a high salary, eat at work, only socialize with coworkers, have all your logistic needs taken care of by your rich employer, and only go home to sleep, it's really easy to feel like your city's problems are other peoples' problems. In other threads on HN, you will see plenty of mudslinging about tech workers who step over homeless people on their way to work or kick neighborhood teams off a public basketball court so they can play a company game.
The Village at San Antonio is supposed to be exactly the type of mixed-use, mixed-income development that urban planners salivate over today. It's got a mix of luxury apartments and affordable housing over street-level retail, connected by pedestrian thoroughfares to the office space that Facebook is about to rent. There are over a dozen restaurants within walking distance, ranging from Chili's, Veggie Grill, and Sajj to The Counter burgers to upscale sit-down places, along with a Walmart, a Safeway, and a Whole Foods. The whole point is to fix all the problems with tech insularity and wealth polarization that everyone complains about here.
OTOH, the cynic in me says that it won't actually do a damn thing about this, and that tech workers will stand around talking to each other and ignoring the locals in line for Veggie Grill while the service workers around them eat at the Walmart cafeteria. And the only effect will be to reduce efficiency for people who could otherwise just grab free food, take it back to their desk, and get back to work. A lot of the point of the free cafes at Google was to cut out the friction of deciding where to eat, walking there, and paying, and instead just focus on the job we had to do.
There's no free lunch. Sometimes it turns out our desires are contradictory, and the flip side of intangibles like community engagement are reduced efficiency and heavy-handed regulation.
I mean, yeah, it's unfortunate for those who won't get free lunches anymore (I'm currently part of the group that does, although I'm not in the bay area) but it's not like you deserve free food as a perk any more than any other random worker. If it were my company inflicting the decision on me after a record earnings call, yeah, I'd probably be pretty pissed off. But a city trying to make sure a corporation in a public, mixed use space doesn't insulate itself too much from the surrounding economy? There are pretty obviously people who benefit and people who are harmed, but it's not like this is the end of the world, those employees just aren't getting a benefit 99% of other employees in the world don't get either.
That's a lot of regulation to fix a perception. If this doesn't work, will they mandate friendship between employees and others in town?
> connected by pedestrian thoroughfares to the office space that Facebook is about to rent
Why is the city building large office space like this if desires strong interaction between people in town? Even corporate campuses in middle America build cafeterias once the office space is big enough. Food, gyms, etc. just make sense as something to make easily accessible -- nothing new here. What did the city think would happen?
If there's a market for people to dine out, you open a restaurant. If there's a market for people to dine in, you open a delivery kitchen or a catering company. Why does a particular set of dining out behavior need to get preserved? (And when did Chili's become a beacon of community preservation?)
It's not at all clear how forcing some software engineers to eat out for lunch will magically fix insularity or wealth polarization. Saying "hello" and "thank you" to a server at a restaurant is supposed to somehow make tech workers feel more in touch with their community (and I don't even know who decided tech workers, and they alone, are out of touch). Also have you been to Castro Street at weekday lunchtime? Free food or not, those restaurants are jam-packed.
> OTOH, the cynic in me says that it won't actually do a damn thing about this, and that tech workers will stand around talking to each other and ignoring the locals in line for Veggie Grill
You seem to be making a distinction between "tech workers" and "locals". If they live and work here, aren't tech workers locals too?
> while the service workers around them eat at the Walmart cafeteria.
I wasn't aware Walmart had a cafeteria. That aside, because cities around the Bay Area have decide not to allow any new housing ever, these service workers are ironically not "locals". They have back-breaking commutes from far-off places. They should be locals but they mostly cannot afford it. Maybe if a more diverse population could afford to live in the Bay Area, restaurants would have a wider customer base and wouldn't have to resort to such coercion.
> the flip side of intangibles like community engagement are reduced efficiency and heavy-handed regulation.
Except that there's very little proof that people who eat out in a city have more "community engagement" (whatever that means). If the city is going for increased engagement from tech workers there's a million other ideas that are better. Here's some:
1. Build more housing so that tech workers can afford to buy in MV instead of renting or commuting from somewhere else (like South San Jose). Living in a place, buying property and raising a family there will deeply connect you to it - you'll care about the schools, parks, libraries, and swimming pools
2. Allow more mixed-use development instead of restricting it to places like the Village
3. Reduce parking minimums so that stores are closer together and more walkalble. Why is only Castro Street like that?
And I think I agree with your cynic. How many people who live in affordable housing are going to be going to the same restaurants for lunch as googler/facebookers anyway?
If you want people to care about a neighborhood, give them housing to live there. Or take a softer approach and tax cafeterias and use the proceeds to actually improves someone's lives.
On one hand, it might lead to higher wages being offered if you can't sell "free food" as a perk of employment. On the other hand, this makes me feel very libertarian and enraged that a local gov is trying to limit where I can get food. Currently I work in IT, and my employer has occasionally made food available with enough regularity that I stay onsite. I don't like having to hike back to my rental car, navigate to the venue, wait to order and pick up food, and suffer in what is usually a dirty public area while eating it. I acknowledge the insulation and welcome it. Often there isn't enough time to eat, so the whole experience is stress away from the stress of customer support. Sometimes I just don't eat if it means going outside. My work has me travelling a lot and it's difficult to r/mealprepsunday from a hotel mini fridge.
There has to be a better way to attract people with access to free food to local restaurants, and it's not this. If local venues are saying they're missing out on patrons that should be available then they should adapt to offering a corporate experience? Starbucks became much more successful when they became a spot for people with Macbooks to vegetate all day in.
You could have the company give an allowance to their employees to go out and spend it on local food, and then give the company a tax break for encouraging investment in said local venues (based on how much was spent). (maybe?)
As for other solutions - personally I'd love to see some form of vouchers + electronic ordering system where employees at local businesses could go online, select from the menu, have their employer pick up the tab (perhaps with some quota or auditing so you aren't always eating gourmet on the employers dime), and your phone beeps when your food will be ready in 5 minutes and you can go walk in, flash your employee badge, and pick it up. That gets a lot of the in-house benefits of higher efficiency and less hassle for workers, but also directs money to local restaurants and gives additional consumer choices for workers. It'd likely cost more for the company (who is paying retail prices rather than contracting with a catering company), but that's because the restaurants have more negotiating leverage when they're also open to the public and aren't held hostage by a single customer, which if you're in favor of consumer choice is exactly how it should work.
90% of this system already exists, too, between company credit cards, Concur or other expense-reporting software, online ordering for DoorDash/Yelp/etc, mixed-use developments, decent restaurants, food-is-done buzzers at sit-down restaurants, etc. It's just there's no integrated portal where you can eg. swipe your badge when you order instead of having to pull out your company credit card or get notifications when it's time to walk over.
Every first Sunday of the month (Sundays were the only days people had off, as Saturdays were actually work day), people were required to get out, and help clean out the neighborhood in 'cleaning actions'.
If you didn't do it, you'd be reprimanded, and if you didn't comply you'd be sent into re-education class, on how community involvement was crucial to a good communist society. If you still didn't comply then you'd be sent off to some 'action' in some more remote area.
Anyways, this is not communist 'community involvement' level yet, but the government should have no say on a person's personal private time.
To fit the allegory of Communist Albania that you gave, the government would be have to be forcing tech workers to eat a minimum quantity of food at local restaurants every week.
That's not what they are doing. You are still free to bring sandwiches from home, or order Soylent online and get it sent direct to your office, bypassing the local economy entirely.
Zoning itself is quite a loud say from the government about what someone may do in their personal private time in their personal private property. For example, you can't run a bakery in your personal private time in an area zoned only for residential use.
Do you think zoning should not be legal?
We're in Germany where this is taxed heavily. If you offer your employees free meals, this becomes part of their taxable income, so you actually have to give them a raise to even this out, and then you have employees that want to opt-out to get the hands on that cash...
I always wondered how Google Germany deals with this. There is a minimum below which it doesn't get taxed and specific items like coffee, water etc fall out of this, but it blew my mind the first time I was trying to set something like this up for our company.
There have been occasional attempts to enforce the law - IRS recently made noises in 2014/15.
The challenge is that it's taxable to the employees but hard to track and prove, it's for relatively little money per employee, and the firms argue that it's for their benefit to secure information/improve productivity/build cohesion...
Google can and will fight far harder than the IRS is willing to on this issue and the IRS isn't entirely sure that they'd win. The IRS can spend resources in places to make a much higher return with an almost certain chance of success.
So no effective taxes on meals.
To make it happen in your company, follow the Google and Uber strategy. Just do it and deal with the law later.
Your ability to pay any fines later may be different from Google's and the chance that one of your employees will call the tax office on you may be dramatically higher because Germany.
But free benefits are not considered income?
I don't see the difference between the two.
As much as I dislike some of the big tech cos and the TechBros working there bragging about the free food all the time, I still believe a company should be able to decide if they want to offer food or not.
Restaurants were unable to turn a profit, so they lobbied successfully and now everyone beside them got a worse outcome.
This is economy 101. A highly visible group of people lobbied hard (in this case the restaurants), and they put a small burden on everyone else to have their issue resolved. However when you calculate the outcome, the burden on everyone else is bigger than the gain that the highly visible group got out of it. Everyone is worse off.
Or rather, 'economy 101' is that anyone with enough leverage, will use monopoly powers in one area, to take control of an adjacent economy.
American Oil empires were not built on some new amazing way to get at oil, it was because some had control of the railroads, and charged their competitors a little more to transport therefore putting them out of business (through aggressive consolidation).
The FB cafeteria example is not a very good one admittedly, but an alternative could be 'they buy up all the restaurants in the area and make them exclusively available for FB staff'. Which they very well could do, and it would then seem kind of crazy, no?
Economically speaking, it would be 'above bar'. After all, 'free market', right? If neighbourhood residents want to eat in a restaurant, screw them, they can go across town!
We live in communities, not economies.
The city ordinance is stupid, but the motivation is not.
Ironically, these are 'rich people problems' ... the kinds of things that happen when little dots of wealth blow up and there is a huge economic inequality, even if most people are 'kind of well off'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE
(On the other hand, in societies where everyone is poor, there can be peace.)
If Facebook is willing to pay substantial amounts of money for a restaurant, while at the same time guaranteeing customers to those who refuse to sell, it would seem the number of public restaurants in the area will explode.
The City already tries to foster community by forcing people to share space against their will, via public transit. It's a dystopian hellscape, not a community. You can't just build those by force.
When I worked at a company that offered free lunch, the company used it to help build rapport and camaraderie among the coworkers. It's one time during the day when the entire team can sit down and eat lunch together and get to know about each other, which is not possible through Slack nor via meetings. Just hanging out with everyone on the team, talking about the latest Marvel movie or Star wars, etc. It was also about convenience as well as reducing stress and decisions on an already-busy day.
If the team still wants to do lunch together everyday at an outside restaurant, it would not be easy, especially the logistics, which would be a nightmare -- getting everyone to agree on one place where everyone likes their food, finding a place that can seat the entire group at a single table, finding transportation / assigning driver/riders if it's beyond walking distance, and having to divide the check afterward (or Venmo), etc. Just for a meal that lasts no more than an hour, top.
I stopped bringing my lunch to work and go out to eat specifically to get a break from my coworkers. Not that there is anything wrong with my coworkers, but I really enjoy the alone time in the middle of the day where I can just sit back and read.
It is not nightmare, it is pretty easy thing to do and friends groups in work do it almost daily without any problem.
It worked fine most of the time and you don't eat with the same ppl every day, so you get to know colleagues from neighboring teams as well...
I really hope Amazon's new HQ helps pave the way to start de-centralizing the tech industry from that one, overcrowded, and increasingly almost hostile spot.
The strips of bougie overpriced restaurants that haunt Palo Alto, MTV, and Sunnyvale are already getting it.
I had expected it would be over taxes.
From the photos and description in the article and elsewhere, it looks like you can get full meals for free, meals that would cost at least $10 if bought at retail.
An employee who took two meals a day at the free company cafeteria every working day would be getting a benefit worth almost $5000/year. That's equivalent to something like an extra $8000/year salary.
I believe that food provided to employees is normally not taxable for the employee, and is actually deductible as a business expense by the employer (but I've not looked into how the recent major tax changes may have affected that), but I think that was intended for things like where employees have to remain available for emergencies during meal periods, or where meal breaks are too short to allow employees time to go get food, and things like that.
The term of art is that the meals have to be provided for the employer's convenience. In the short meal break case, for example, providing meals is for the employer's convenience because it saves them from having to offer longer meal breaks.
Meals offered for things like goodwill, morale, or attracting employees are not considered to be for the employer's convenience, but are still OK if they are de minimis. So things like donuts, soft drinks, meals when employees have to take occasional overtime, the occasional company party or picnic, and things like that are fine.
Putting in a cafeteria that offers free full meals to all employees all the time probably is not de minimis. It may not actually violate tax laws, but if it does not it is pushing the limits hard so I'd certainly not be surprised to see attempts to crack down from that angle.
Forcing workers out of the office without their consent seems disingenuous. Travel expenses can be a burden, and such travel can cause disruption in areas where rideshare services may be flaky and increasingly dangerous to passengers.
The increase of food trucks is, on average, perhaps providing office workers with less nutritious food options which they have less control over (especially compared to big tech office cafes).
Increasing use of outside food establishments increases the 'lunch commute', adding to already-insane traffic, pollution, and stress for workers who already commute too much.
On the plus side, this may create increased demand for lunch spots, however it is increasingly difficult for them to operate while providing affordable prices for healthy food, and I don't think the increased demand would truly offset this effect, but rather could have negative effects on the workers caught in the middle.
I live and work in the downtown part of San Jose, and on some days of the week work in downtown SF (SoMa near Caltrain).
I rarely spend $12-15 (more so in SJ but also in SF). Usually the significant cost is adding a soft drink of some sort (soda, juice, tea, etc.) because I'm finding restaurants are increasing the price of those for whatever reason ($2.50 at some).
Definitely wouldn't say $10 for a full meal is "unrealistically low". Perhaps it's really a matter of choice. Some people prefer to get lunch often from New American restaurants and similar where you need to tip, etc. Some don't mind going to simpler places like a taco truck around the corner, or Panera Bread/Chipotle/etc. (although I will easily admit Panera's cost has increasingly gotten more expensive, as you describe).
So the real value is probably more like $2, and even at two full meals per day that would translate to 200 working days times $4 is about $800.
A better way to think of it would be how much it would cost otherwise, and it's $10. So the calculation of annual value is pretty much there.
> “We felt the employees who work there should be able to patronize the businesses—the smaller businesses—in this shopping center”
Employees already have the ability to patronize these businesses. This law is about compelling patronage.
1: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/New-Facebook-Offices-M...
In this case, they're removing the ability for facebook to keep the path of least resistance for food on campus to encourage people to eat outside the office, since they're already putting a bunch of effort into making the mixed-use retail/office/living area.
Calling this compulsion is like calling taxes slavery - you might feel strongly about the situation, it might impact you negatively, but don't expect much sympathy from those outside the bubble...
Or what this very small minority thinks is good for the community, and forcing it on everyone else. That's how it goes with all government decisions, of course.
There are fun loopholes though. Here's the text of the condition for facebook.
"CAFETERIA CONDITION: In order to foster synergy between office, restaurant, and retail uses in the Center and realize the economic vitality of the project, the project anticipates employees in the office space will utilize food and retail services available in the Center. The applicant will encourage tenants and employees of tenants to utilize food and retail services available in the Center. Neither the applicant nor tenant(s) will subsidize meals by more than fifty percent (50%) or provide free meals for employees in the office space on a regular daily basis. An employer can subsidize or pay for employee meals as long as they are patronizing restaurants in the Center.
In addition: The applicant may make a request to amend this condition. The City Manager or a designee may make a recommendation to the City Council on this matter."
So for example:
Facebook could open a restaurant in the center. If it does, it cannot legally choose to discriminate in who they serve (in california, anyway. In a lot of states you often can).
It can, however, legally price discriminate in various ways (AFAIK, if someone has case law otherwise, love to see it). This is in fact, quite common.
So for example, it could charge the public that walks in 1 million a meal. It could offer advance tickets to employees at no charge, and no one else.
This is also non-discriminatory on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin (which is what the 1964 civil rights act covers), disabilities (covering the ADA), etc.
I don't believe it would be found discriminatory to a protected class in most states (a lot of states add political affiliation, etc).
(this is just an example, and one i'm sure the IRS would have fun with :P)
I don't think they have really thought this through though. For example, would this forbid a soupe kitchen that serves hot meals, how about a nursing home or a hospital?
Also, the quality of ingredients and the creativity and care in preparation and presentation is significantly better than I've seen elsewhere, although the executive dining room at global HQ for one of the companies I worked for did rival Facebook or Google's typical cafe experience.
My employer gives me free health care. Should that be restricted so I have to spend my own dollars and not get the benefit of a group plan?
Should employers not be allowed to give a transit subsidy because it hurts Lyft/Uber?
Maybe tech companies should not be allowed to offer stock based compensation because it's unfair to other city residents who work jobs without such things.
Your health care is not “free” it’s part of your compensation where the employer gets to choose how you’re compensated. I get healthcare via my wife’s insurance and I would much rather have the money.
In a sane society, your health care wouldn’t be tied to your employer.
... while they hand out hundreds of thousands of free needles that end up on the street, among shit.
It's better than the alternative, which is people sharing needles and giving each other all sorts of diseases.
Not only do they hand out free needles though, but also free sharps containers, and there are needle disposal bins all over the place for users to drop their used needles in.
I'm not sure how they convinced all the heroin users to dispose of their needles correctly, but they've done a fairly good job. It's rare for me to see a needle on the street.
Unfortunately the suburbs are now hostile too: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/New-Facebook-Offices-M...
These cafeterias are located in the city (just like a restaurant would be), creating jobs in the city (just like a restaurant would), paying good wages and benefits to these people (unlike most restaurants would).
Absurdity of this proposal aside, most food service workers in these cafeterias are contractors who are not paid well and receive shitty, if any, benefits.
Also consider that workplace cafeteria jobs generally have fixed schedules with weekends off.
One thing they should do in my opinion is make the place more pedestrian friendly. Maybe they could replace the big parking lots that create sprawl with denser garages?
(a) Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Genentech are grandfathered into their cafeterias, and it's fairly unlikely any other companies will build cafeterias.
(b) This is partially because most companies are too small for a dedicated cafeteria, so they use a catering service like ZeroCater, which source most meals from local restaurants that don't do much or any lunch service.
(c) There are other companies like Gap, which have a cafeteria largely because there is nothing near their office but parking lots, and they are next to UCSF which certainly has at least one cafeteria at that location.
One of the major ways this misses the boat is that there are lower paid employees in tech companies, often contractors, who have access to free food in ways that substantially makes life more affordable for them. So yes, engineers pulling six figures are maybe given a little toooo much perks, but when that is spread around, I'm strongly in favor of it. There are people in these tech offices making not much more than minimum wage, and I'm not just talking about janitorial and maintenance staff - I'm talking about CS, QA, UX contractors and all manner of other office work.
Safai is not really a progressive, so he's probably come up with this idea to overcompensate for that and appeal to progressives. This doesn't really sound like Aaron Peskin, either, who mostly works to coalition build and is primarily focused on housing policy.
I would suspect that Peskin is supporting this to get Safai to work with him on some other bill, and that he expects it to fail.
No one has mentioned the jobs to be destroyed in catering, nor the fact that catering jobs pay far better than restaurants for all the people making the food!
FB workers are rich, and they'll not want to eat every day in the caf, and they'll be out and about as much as they would otherwise.
The alternative won't be 'restos' it will be 'the microwave'.
From what I understand, pretty much 100% of the work is fulfilled by contractors. While I could be wrong, that's not what I would call a "steady, consistent job"
The people I know in SF tech take BART, grocery shop, buy coffee, go to bars, go out for dinner, buy clothes, buy and sell on craigslist, hang out in parks, play soccer, bike, go dancing, date, have kids, etc, all in their city just like everyone else.
We are not that different from any other professional industry and shouldn't let people imply that we somehow contribute less to this city.
I get that this is localized in an area that has companies that probably offer better benefits than most others, but the idea of restricting benefits at all seems ludicrous to me
The regulation treadmill never stops, there's always a need to introduce new regulation to fix things broken by the previous regulation.
Right now, with tech it's heavily favored toward catered food which local restaurants don't necessarily specialize in. At my start up we have a generic catering company that will have a rotating meal each day. It's cost-effective and still good quality food and removes the hassle of our Workplace Services from figuring out what food we should get next time.
If local restaurants could adapt to such a model and made more of an effort to advertise toward their market and perhaps arrange a monthly catered meal or something of the sort, they might see themselves doing better.
I mean, how are you supposed to compete against cafeterias that get to literally embed themselves in a campus?
> At my start up we have a generic catering company that will have a rotating meal each day
FWIU that would still be allowed under the rules everyone's complaining about.
The companies would have owned the property, and making the meal cost at least 30% cheaper.
Wow. Incredibly corrupt. I'm guessing next lunch boxes are going to be banned?
""CAFETERIA CONDITION: In order to foster synergy between office, restaurant, and retail uses in the Center and realize the economic vitality of the project, the project anticipates employees in the office space will utilize food and retail services available in the Center. The applicant will encourage tenants and employees of tenants to utilize food and retail services available in the Center. Neither the applicant nor tenant(s) will subsidize meals by more than fifty percent (50%) or provide free meals for employees in the office space on a regular daily basis. An employer can subsidize or pay for employee meals as long as they are patronizing restaurants in the Center.
In addition: The applicant may make a request to amend this condition. The City Manager or a designee may make a recommendation to the City Council on this matter."
That said, I would still have no problem if it was the landlord (WeWork) making this restriction, instead of the MTV government. This is a private business-to-business matter, and shouldn't be the domain of government.
It is not the problem of the business that decides to plant itself in a location and provide food first off. All the vendors of that location are privy to supply... unless this large corp has signed a contract with a specific vendor.
However, if they did, the individual food vendor would never know because it would be like the corp planned to not make a footprint. So they just provided food. nbd. So they did not hurt the local market and keeping it inward.
So now outside food vendors are irritated because a precaution was put in place to not affect them, but "an unknown - of growing" got too big and now they feel they can't survive next to their neighbor. --Valid point. So how do we as big corps help the neighbor... and this is not just about food.
No opinions of my own offered here. I've enjoyed offices with and without meal options in SoMa and around the Bay.
But at the same time, I'm not shocked. This is a classic California move and government overstep.
P.S. I work at MTV area and finding parking at lunch is already a challenge. With the influx of Facebook lunchgoers, it will become impossible to park in downtown.
1. The "Progressive" majority on the Board of Supervisors passes it and Mayor Breed vetoes it, giving Progressives yet another "you're a shill for big tech!" line of attack
2. It doesn't make it out of committee and everybody quickly forgets what an ass Aaron Peskin is
Just ignore it and donate to reform-minded leaders like Theo Ellington, Sonja Trauss, and Christine Johnson.
Assume you have employees on an average salary of USD$140K (example round figure) doing 7 hours work with 1 hour for lunch.
Ignoring the staggering environmental impact, if you lose an extra 30 minutes (1/14th of the 7 hour work day) because of transport and parking bullshit due to this new rule, then you are effectively losing USD$10K per annum per employee.
You can't really do that in the coastal areas but maybe inland or in states like Arizona or New Mexico. Put it all under a solar dome so you can control the heat. Okay, maybe that's too much :-)
They aren't doing anything wrong.