The "Family Fund"

Useless:

At Next Door, the community-oriented, “sustainable” restaurant chain owned by billionaire Kimbal Musk, workers were told they were part of a family.

...But workers at Next Door did have something called the Family Fund. A pool of money they contributed to out of their paychecks, the fund was supposed to be there for them in times of crisis.

Then a crisis hit. And the Family Fund wasn’t there for them at all.

...As the restaurant chain grappled with the business impact of the coronavirus, Next Door told employees on March 16 that it would temporarily shut down operations for two weeks. Managers would have to take pay cuts, they were told. Hourly workers would get no pay at all, though they were told they could access paid sick time ― but they never got it. Many applied for grants from the Family Fund, according to several former employees.

What happened next was “pretty shady,” said Reggie Moore, the former head chef at the Indianapolis Next Door and one of seven former Next Door employees who spoke with HuffPost.

Five days after the temporary shutdown, management told workers that the Family Fund was changing. “In an effort to better help our employees, we are in the process of revising our Family Fund program,” reads an email sent March 21 to employees, which HuffPost reviewed.

The email promises that under the revised program, employees will get a $400 grant within one to two days. There was a catch, written in bold and underlined: “Please note that if you have already applied to Family Fund, you will need to re-apply through the new application link.”

But employees never got that link. Just two days later, on March 23, about 100 of them were officially out of a job. Musk closed four of the restaurant’s 11 locations, in Indianapolis, Memphis, the Cleveland area and Highlands Ranch, Colorado.

The timing of the closures, halfway through the “temporary” two-week pause, surprised some workers. Many asked about the Family Fund.

That’s only for current employees, they were told. “This has always been a rule of the program,” wrote a Next Door human relations representative in an email to one employee in Memphis who asked about the money. “Of course, we are all upset by the closure of these locations and we are here to assist you in any way we can.”

Workers in the restaurants, some of whom made the tipped minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, were not given any severance. Many have not been paid their accrued sick time.

“It’s a betrayal. It seems really sneaky,” one former Next Door manager told HuffPost, declining to publish his name for fear of repercussions from Musk.