To those who have supported Dock Street Brewing Company in the past 35 years as a business and during our 13 years here in West Philly, we want to offer our gratitude and appreciation.
Your calls and emails with words of encouragement, as well as your support as you continue to come by for pizza and beer mean the world to us. We want to take this opportunity to share with you our core beliefs, who we are as a business and as individuals, and what our plans are for moving forward.
Dock Street Brewery is a decidedly small, family-owned business. We enjoy being independently-owned with the freedom to make great beer, the occasional political statement, and to commit ourselves fully to our community, customers and staff.
Like every other small business, coronavirus has put us on our heels, knocked us backwards and shut us down. This put us in a situation we could not have foreseen or prepared for, as a business and as people. Fortunately, we were designated an essential business with a critically reduced model which allowed us to fight another day to survive as a business. That model, unfortunately, provides for and requires a severely truncated staff.
When the realities of coronavirus sunk in, back in mid-March, we communicated with our employees as swiftly as we could. Ideally, we could have taken a moment to speak with each member of our staff personally, but time, the pandemic, and crisis-mode did not allow it. Regardless of how it was communicated, the result was the same and in mid-March of 2020, we had to do the unthinkable, which is layoff our staff without guarantee of future employment because we had the inclination this epidemic would change the industry indefinitely.
We appreciate the feedback that we did not handle this well and we have learned from this. Going forward we will communicate in a more sensitive, one-on-one way. To those staff members that reached out with encouragement and understanding of a difficult situation for all, we thank you.
As a result of the current conditions, we are surviving in a way that is different than we are used to but we are employing as many as possible. Turning a Pre-Covid Front-of-House staff of nearly 20 to one of at most 4 or 5 through the summer is an impossible puzzle. We felt the best solution for rehiring was to offer an opportunity for Pre-Covid staff to come in for individual conversation to go over the details of service, compensation, safety and schedule in our new post-Covid business model. This was not taken well.
Dock Street Brewing Company, and specifically Dock Street West, is truly saddened by the way things stand with some of our pre-Covid staff.
Because of our decision about how to reopen and re-hire, we’ve been picketed, slandered and boycotted. We respect the right to express their views but one of the reasons for writing this letter is that we believe some of the accusations are unjust. There has been a lot of misinformation spread around, including things that are outright false. We have learned that some picketers were people unaffiliated with our company that were posturing as employees and making false accusations and testimonies, as well, which is not fair to us, our customers, or even to the picketers.
We have always provided PPE and have made it our highest priority to maintain a safe, clean environment for the safety of our staff and customers. There is a detailed COVID plan in place, pulled from the plans of industry leaders.
We are and have been open to listening and to dialogue provided we feel it will be mutually respectful and solution oriented. Since early June, we have repeatedly invited all members of the Pre-Covid staff, including those that continued to work through the pandemic and into Yellow Phase, the opportunity to come meet with us one-on-one as we thought this would be a safer space to communicate - literally and figuratively. We recognize now that some of them wanted to meet as a group rather than one-on-one, which we (safely) did on 6/30/2020. (More on that below)
We concede that the food industry needs a second look. However, the brewpub model can not survive a FOH base wage of $15/hr plus tips. We have been and will continue to promise a guarantee of a minimum of $15/hr with a combination of wages and tips.
We agreed to come up with a better, more empathetic internal protocol for community members dealing with homelessness. That was a no-brainer.
We did ask staff to re-apply, not in the traditional sense, but as a way to gauge interest, engage in conversation and, yes, to update files as it's a formality of re-opening.
We have been asked by some pre-Covid staff to create a business model that clearly will not work for Dock Street West and South. We’ve listened to the issues; on some we can agree, some - specifically relating to increased pre-tip wages - we are sadly unable to accommodate. But we remain committed to achieving the balance of running a business, serving our community, keeping our employees happy and bettering our company. We have always and will always listen to all reasonable discourse.
We agree that hospitality staff should have better protection and going forward we commit to continual evaluation and conversation.
At the end of the day, all of our decisions were made with an eye to survive as a company, employer and a source of comfort in our community. Many ideas suggested are not sustainable and would have ensured the demise of our business. And yes, because of this situation and this pandemic, we have looked at ourselves and committed to a rebirth.
What we will do is be a much better business moving forward. We dedicate ourselves fully to making time to nurture all of our employees so that they feel as invested in, as passionate about, and as essential to this company as we feel. Our team deserves to love their jobs and to have employers and managers they can trust and respect, and we vow to be that for every future employee. There is absolutely no shame in holding ourselves accountable for the things that we have not done in the best way.
We have met with some of the Pre-Covid staffers that were vocal about feeling mistreated and left behind by our new Covid-19 model, specifically those picketing us for the past week, and it was a really productive conversation. We feel that both sides were heard, fears expressed and hurt aired out. Some explanations were given - which is something that both sides have been unable to do through the shouting and chaos of the past couple weeks - and apologies were made in both directions. It felt like our corner of 50th and Baltimore was once again a place many can call home, and can return to being a pillar of the community and a safe space for all.
To clarify, every single person currently employed at Dock Street West and Dock Street South up to today has been here since Pre-Covid. Just about all of the current employees worked through the entire Covid-19 pandemic, which is still on-going. We could not have gotten through the pandemic without them, and they know that they have a home with Dock Street.
We ask that anyone with questions, comments or suggestions, no matter how well-meaning, please reach out to us personally rather than using the blanket of the internet to make accusations and claims that are unfounded, untrue, damaging and hurtful. We welcome any discussion about how to revolutionise the industry at large, but we will not be scapegoated and demonized as emblematic of the entire industry. At the end of the day, we’re a 35-year-old, family run business, we’re decidedly Philadelphian in our successes and failures and triumphs and potholes. We’re not a corporation. If we wanted to be, we could have been. We love what we do and we love our neighborhood, our community and our city - it’s who we are at our very core.