Local Burger Business Fires Workers After They RSVP’ed for Pro-Immigrant Walkout
Hat Creek Burger Company reacted quickly after national protest
By Jordan Buckley, Fri., Feb. 14, 2025
Last week, management at Hat Creek Burger Company in Dripping Springs fired eight employees following their participation in the Day Without Immigrants on Monday, Feb. 3, former employees told us. The protest encouraged people to stay home from work to elucidate how important immigrants are to the U.S.
Francisco Perez, an assistant general manager who showed up for his shift at the Belterra Village eatery that day, was also nonetheless terminated – accused of instigating workers to skip their shift, which he denies.
Perez didn’t think Hat Creek should have necessarily closed for the day in solidarity with its foreign-born workforce,“but they should have been honest with us and said this is what might happen to you,” he told the Chronicle.
Hat Creek did not respond to our requests for comment.
He says the manager initially stated that participating workers would merely lose their hours that day, and she asked Perez to procure a tally of those planning to miss.
Yet when he furnished the list, he says management changed its tune.
That Sunday evening, Feb. 2, the manager dispatched a flurry of text messages to employees, suddenly christening Monday a “Día de agradecimiento al equipo!” (team appreciation day) – offering a free meal and $25 Amazon gift card for anyone who showed.
Gudelia Calderon told the Chronicle, “In the four-and-a-half years that I worked for Hat Creek, there had never been an Employee Appreciation Day. They didn’t even give us anything for Christmas.”
The website for Hat Creek – which has seven locations across the Austin area – features a video of founder Drew Gressett preaching the centrality of “fellowship” to his business model: “Above burgers, we want to be known for relationships.”
Catalina Portillo takes issue with his claim, saying in Spanish, “I spent nearly five years laboring for them, and fired for a single day of not attending work, which is my right. As a Hispanic, clearly, this is racism.”
Another of Gressett’s pronouncements in that promo reel – “Hat Creek, as we know it today, is a place for families” – doesn’t sit well with Calderon.
“If families mattered to Hat Creek, they wouldn’t have fired my husband and me. They know our children depend on us two. And they terminated us without a worry,” she said.
Calderon, like other employees, had informed Hat Creek prior to her shift that she would not be coming in.
Although she has a work visa – thereby less vulnerable than undocumented workers to Trump’s pledge of mass deportation – Calderon said that upon learning of the nationwide protest she resolved she “would be supporting the Latino community 100%” so she gave the manager a heads-up on her planned absence.
“She texted me that I would be written up for missing work; she never said I would be fired. I worked for that company for four-and-a-half years,” Calderon said. “This is a huge injustice.”
Jordan Buckley is a co-founder of Hays County advocacy group Mano Amiga and left in 2022. He is now publisher of Caldwell/Hays Examiner, a nonprofit newspaper south of Austin.
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