Companies

Atlas Restaurant Group is headquartered in Baltimore and owns and operates several high-end restaurants. The Atlas Restaurant Group is the largest privately held Baltimore-based restaurant group, employing over 500 people in 9 different establishments. Atlas Restaurant Group owns Ouzo Bay, Azumi, Loch Bar, Harbor East Deli, Tagliata, The Elk Room, The Bygone, Italian Disco, Ouzo Beach, The Choptank & Maximón.

• The Atlas Group faced a lot of backlash when a video surfaced on social media showing an Atlas Group restaurant denying service to a black woman and her nine-year-old son due to the boy's clothing. In a video shared on social media, Marcia Grant and her child, Dallas, were repeatedly told by a manager at Ouzo Bay Restaurant that they could not eat there because of their dress code prohibiting athletic wear. The video, which shows Grant's son wearing sneakers, gym shorts and an Air Jordan T-shirt, also recorded another child, who was white, in a similar outfit enjoying his meal at an outside table.
• The Atlas Restaurant Group has since issued an apology and fired the two managers involved in the incident.

Refinery29 is an American women’s lifestyle media organization. The popular website was founded in 2005 and has over 450 global employees. Since it’s launch, Refinery29 has also expanded to include websites for the UK and German populations.

• On Monday, June 8th, Christene Barberich, the top editor and co-founder of Refinery stated that she would be stepping down from her leadership position after a number of employees came forward on social media describing the toxic work environment that they faced.
• Racial discrimination was one of the driving factors of Refinery29’s poor work environment. Employees mentioned racial pay disparity and being constantly “mixed up” for other employees of color as two of their major complaints. One former senior editor, Ashley Alese Edwards, who now works at Google, stated that the concerns she raised were routinely ignored and that her job title did not reflect her experience or duties at the company.