When she first came to San Francisco roughly a decade ago, Ermei Wu landed a job in a Chinatown restaurant to support her three kids. Like many monolingual immigrants, she didn’t have anyone explaining wage laws to her in the language she speaks, Cantonese. 

For two years, Qiming Huang, 68, has obsessed over $9,680.72: The money his last employer — a now-closed Chinese restaurant on Clement Street — never paid him. Huang started as a dishwasher there in 2021.

The labor rights coalition that helped workers may have its budget slashed by Mayor London Breed as she deals with a $789 million deficit. Seventeen former employees of a closed San Francisco dining institution will receive nearly $60,000 in back wages owed since the pandemic in a deal with the owner announced Thursday.

Tetet Naval, a Filipina San Franciscan, was waiting for the bus along Market Street in June when she felt something strike her in the back. Startled, she turned to see a man with a stick in hand. He yelled at her, “Go back to your country,” she recalled. Terrified he would do something worse, she ran.

The 8 Bayshore Muni meandered through the predominantly Asian neighborhoods of San Francisco’s southside — the Excelsior, Bayshore and Visitacion Valley. Decades ago, the area was majority Black.

When John Wang worked at Z & Y Restaurant, one of the most famous dining destinations in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he says he didn’t get overtime pay, the restaurant routinely took his tips and breaks weren’t possible. “I can’t even use my fingers to count the number of times I used the bathroom at Z & Y,” Wang said.

Roughly 200 people gathered at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza outside City Hall on Valentine’s Day to offer a space for community healing and to call for more investment in community-based public-safety solutions for Asian-American neighborhoods. Recent attacks against elderly Asian-Americans in the Bay Area have rekindled collective trauma for those communities brought about by a wave of xenophobic hate crimes since the onset of the pandemic.

Investigators at California’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement said Thursday they have cited Bay Area restaurants for more than $10 million in stolen wages. Of the $10 million in alleged wage theft, half comes from wages stolen from 133 workers at a single restaurant, Kome Japanese Seafood Buffet in Daly City.

Yesterday, Chinese Progressive Association Youth MOJO (Youth Movement of Justice and Organizing) leaders joined nearly 200 other high school youth in the Bay Area in front of San Francisco City Hall to speak out against violence. As part of a larger nationwide effort to protest our leaders’ failure to pass laws that protect us from gun violence, students turned out from Washington, Lincoln, Lowell, Galileo, June Jordan, and many more high schools.