More than half a million fast-food
workers in California are about
to get a raise—not because of the
voluntary generosity of their bosses, but as a
result of a hard-won labor victory. Governor
Gavin Newsom on September 28 signed AB
1228 into law; its title says it all:
“Fast Food Council: health, safety, employment,
and minimum wage.”
As a result of this new law, the state of
California will form a council, which will
include worker representatives, to oversee
health, safety, and workplace matters for
fast-food workers and to decide their minimum
wage. Further, the law pushes up the minimum
wage for such workers to $20
an hour starting next April after which the council will
determine subsequent annual increases.
That starting point of $20 an hour is
significantly more than the state’s already
relatively high minimum wage of $15.50
an hour (one that’s set to increase to $16
in January 2024). California’s fast-food workers
will now be among the highest-paid low-wage
workers in the nation.
The origins of this momentous victory can
be traced back to a movement that began on the
opposite side of the country more than a decade
ago. The Service Employees International Union
(SEIU)’s Fight for $15 campaign, launched
in the form of a walkout in New York City in 2012 demanded a wage floor that,
at the time, sounded audacious. While it’s no
longer terribly bold to demand $15 an hour in an
economy where inflation
has disproportionately impacted low-wage workers and where billionaires
continue to enjoy unimaginable riches, consider this: there are more
than a dozen states in the U.S. where the minimum wage remains
pegged to the ridiculously paltry federal
minimum of $7.25 an hour.
The Fight for $15 movement used a clever
alliteration to change the narrative on what
low-wage workers deserved to earn. Earning its
fair share of well-deserved
criticism for not building explicit “worker
power,” SEIU has poured millions of dollars of
resources into the movement, playing the long
game toward building a national
fast-food workers’ union, one that has yet to materialize.
In the interim, SEIU has championed the
idea of forming sector-specific councils at the
state level, which is what AB 1228 is centered
on. The New
York Times described this as, “sectoral
bargaining, in which workers and management
negotiate wages and conditions across an entire
industry as opposed to at individual companies,
often location by location.” By forming
alliances with state representatives, organized
labor can demand regulations of industries where
workers are routinely abused and exploited
without having to wait for union representation.
Starbucks workers understand the
challenge of organizing unions one restaurant at
a time. While workers at hundreds of the coffee
chain’s locations have successfully petitioned
to join Starbucks
Workers United (SWU), none have been able to sign a union
contract with Starbucks yet. The company has violated
so many labor laws so fast that the federal National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been unable to
keep up.
All Starbucks has to do is fire workers
known to lead union organizing drives and then
ignore the NLRB’s demand to negotiate if and
when a complaint is filed. The current labor
laws are toothless in the face of such
aggressive union-busting.
The fast-food industry is even more
challenging. Unlike Starbucks, fast-food
corporations tend to operate on a franchise
model, which helps
parent companies avoid liability for labor
violations at individual restaurants.
According to a 2021
report by the UCLA Labor Center, fast-food workers routinely “experience
physical assault, harassment, intimidation,
threats, and verbal abuse.” Further, “Restaurant
workers have the highest rates of sexual
harassment of any industry.”
That ability to intimidate workers is key
to why unionization efforts have failed (Fight
for $15’s original sentiment was “$15
and a union”). It’s one thing
to demand higher wages by walking out for a
day—which many workers have risked their jobs
to do numerous times—and it’s another thing to
organize for permanent union protection.
The fast-food industry is so antagonistic
to labor organizing that it threatened to go
directly to voters in a high-stakes
gamble at the ballot box when Newsom signed an earlier
version of the new labor law in 2022 that
included holding parent companies responsible
for its franchises. An industry-funded
proposition slated for the November 2024
California ballot would have asked voters to
rollback the labor law.
Democratic as the state’s ballot measures
are on paper, moneyed interests have tested the
system time and again, realizing that massively
well-funded public relations campaigns to
deceive voters into backing corporate interests
offer a great ROI (return on investment) to
preserve shareholder profits.
The highest profile case in point is the
2020 California ballot measure Proposition
22, which allowed rideshare and delivery
companies like Uber and Lyft to treat their
employees as individual contractors, and
therefore exempt them from standard labor
protections. The industry spent upward of $200
million to pass Proposition 22—the most
expensive ballot battle at the time—and
prevailed, even in a state that embraces labor
rights.
Likely realizing that the fast-food
industry could hire armies of PR consultants,
marketing experts, and election campaigners to
similarly convince voters that the 2022 labor
law was not in their best interest, the governor’s
office brought labor and fast-food to the
negotiating table. AB 1228 was the result of a compromise
that was struck: the legislature would pass a
new version of the bill without the threat to
the franchise model in exchange for the
fast-food companies withdrawing their ballot
measure to undo the entire law.
On the one hand, the passage of this new
labor law proves that a corporate oligarchy
still has far too much sway on our democratic
processes, using money and resources as weapons
to undermine people’s rights.
On the other hand, it also proves that
there is no need to capitulate to corporate
employers and that an alliance between organized
labor and lawmakers can move the needle on
workers’ rights. Further, the fact that this
battle took place in California, the nation’s
largest, and the world’s fourth-largest
economy, creates a strong precedent for the rest
of the nation.
Most importantly, more than half a
million low-wage workers struggling in one of
the most exploitative industries in the nation
will shortly get a decent pay bump and enjoy a
measure of protection from the forthcoming
council.
This
commentary was
produced by
Economy
for All,
a project of the
Independent
Media Institute.
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