Fight for $15 and a Union
Supporters of California’s fast-food worker legislation demonstrate.
Well, that didn’t even take one full day.
On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed landmark legislation creating sectoral bargaining for the state’s more than half-million fast-food workers, the restaurant industry struck back. They filed a notice with the state’s attorney general that they would begin canvassing for signatures to put a measure on the 2024 ballot that would repeal the law and asked that the state not allow the law to take effect on January 1, 2023, which is the date the new law mandates that it come into effect.
There’s really nothing surprising about this play. As I predicted last week, the mega-corporations that dominate the fast-food industry know full well that one tried-and-true way of negating the pro-worker efforts of the state’s elected officials is to put a gazillion dollars into ballot measures that re-establish the unchallenged rule of the boardroom. That was the case when Uber, Lyft, and their associated ilk dropped more than $100 million on their 2020 ballot measure to repeal a new law that would have brought them under the control of wage and hour legislation. Their initiative was crafted to be so confusing that many if not most of the Californians who voted for it believed that a Yes vote actually empowered the drivers whose income the measure actually diminished. And with that gazillion dollars driving that deceptive message home, the Yes side prevailed.
If it worked for Uber, the folks atop the fast-food chain (and chains) doubtless calculated, it could work for McDonald’s. The chains have been joined in this effort by the National Restaurant Association—the only major organization to consistently oppose ballot measures raising state minimum wages—which fears that raising fast-food workers’ wages will require raising the wages of restaurant kitchen and waitstaffs as well. Their campaign will likely center on the rising costs of food, though it’s by no means apparent that the costs of food will be rising in the fall of 2024, when the measure, if it collects sufficient signatures to qualify it, will be put before the voters.
What the new law does is create a council empowered to set standards for wages and workplace conditions for the chains’ fast-food outlets, which employ roughly 550,000 California workers. The council’s ten members will include four worker representatives (two of them actual fast-food workers), four management representatives, and two state officials. As such, it marks the first appearance of sectoral bargaining in the United States, though it’s long been a common practice in many Western European nations. (A recent Prospect explainer on sectoral bargaining, authored by our former intern Isabelle Gius, was part of the background material distributed to California legislators as they studied the then-pending bill.)
One outstanding question is whether California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a pro-labor liberal, can find a way to block the effort to keep the law from coming into effect on January 1 of next year. If he can, which is only conceivable if the industry fails to collect enough verifiable signatures by January 1, the 2024 referendum could not only negate the law but also roll back wage increases likely to have significantly raised the incomes of more than a million California families—something that might make the referendum harder to pass. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, though, it’s that corporations are generally undaunted by the prospect of very visibly embracing the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. As Starbucks’s Howard Schultz has made lamentably clear, a loss of reputation is as nothing when measured against the threat of worker power.
