Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo
Fast-food workers and their supporters march past the state Capitol calling for passage of a bill that would provide increased power and protections to fast-food workers, August 16, 2022, in Sacramento, California.
Some credit where credit is due: I can’t think of any institution or person in recent decades that’s so profoundly changed social and economic policy for the better—while settling for Plan B—than SEIU and its president, Mary Kay Henry.
Plan A, when the union began its fight for “$15 and a union” for fast-food workers a decade ago, was, well, to unionize fast-food workers and win them a livable hourly wage of $15. At the time, the canniest union strategist I knew told me that unionizing fast-food workers was a pipe dream: that there were far too many outlets owned by far too many franchisees, who effectively shielded such corporate behemoths as McDonald’s from the threat of a unionized workforce. Classic unionization studies in the mid-20th century by Clark Kerr and other academics demonstrated that the only cost-efficient organizing campaigns focused on massive workplaces. Going Taco Bell by Taco Bell would never really work. (Starbucks, to be sure, may prove the exception to this rule.)
Today, ten years after Henry committed SEIU to the $15 and a union campaign, the union still can’t claim any fast-food workers as dues-paying members. (More than a thousand Starbucks baristas have voted to join, but they’re not members until they have a contract.) But a Plan B fallback has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. By highlighting the low wages and difficult working conditions of millions of American workers, the campaign compelled some big cities, and then bigger states, including California and New York, to raise their minimum wage to $15 and even higher. And this week in California, the campaign won a stunning victory when the state Senate followed the Assembly by passing a bill that establishes sectoral bargaining for all of the state’s roughly 550,000 fast-food workers.
Under the terms of the legislation, the state will establish a ten-member council, consisting of two representatives of franchise owners, two from the corporate chains, two fast-food workers, two fast-food “advocates” (likely SEIU), and two who are the governor’s appointees to head labor-related state agencies. The council is charged with regulating pay and conditions in the sector. The legislation also sets a minimum hourly wage for the half-million workers in the sector at $22, and stipulates that the wage will be adjusted annually in accord with the consumer price index, so long as the increase doesn’t exceed 3.5 percent. The council is also empowered to set industry-wide standards for a host of working conditions and nondiscriminatory practices (California fast-food workers being heavily Black or Latino). In theory, the state agency heads in a Republican gubernatorial administration could side with the employer representatives to retard or repeal worker protections; in practice, for the foreseeable future, Republicans are about as likely to elect a governor in California as the Trotskyists are.
Sectoral bargaining is a common feature of labor-management relations in a number of European countries, all of them with proportionately larger union movements than ours. In the U.S., there’s been pattern bargaining under which a powerful union has won similar contracts from the large firms in an oligopolistic industry, as the UAW did with the Big Three automakers in the days when those firms dominated the U.S. market. The U.S. has also seen the federal government, and some states, enact industry-wide standards, as the Depression-era Congress did in 1935 with the Motor Carrier Act, which set a floor beneath which interstate trucking companies could not lower their rates. By taking wages out of competition, the act ultimately enabled the Teamsters to completely unionize the sector—though the effort required 30 years’ work and the genius and drive of Jimmy Hoffa.
Under the terms of the legislation, the state will establish a ten-member council charged with regulating pay and conditions in the fast-food sector.
But creating a board that will include both labor and management and state representatives to set industry-wide standards—that is, sectoral bargaining—is something new under the American sun. It may, in time, help SEIU actually organize fast-food workers and win contracts with McDonald’s and its ilk, by limiting the kinds of harm that employers routinely inflict on workers attempting to go union (see, e.g., Starbucks’s Howard Schultz). Conversely, it could also lead workers to conclude that they don’t need a union. Whatever the outcome, actual unionization, which is regulated by a long-dysfunctional federal law, remains dauntingly difficult, though the bill the California legislature just passed may effectively limit some of employers’ union-busting ploys.
All that said, the fate of the bill is still not entirely determined. Gov. Gavin Newsom has yet to say he’ll sign it; it’s worth noting that despite the three-fourths majorities that the Democrats hold in each legislative house, the bill won just a bare majority in both those houses. Henry told me Monday that she was confident the governor would sign it, citing all the work that SEIU did for him in the recent recall election that Newsom won decisively. With more than 700,000 members in California, SEIU is a political giant in the state, as Newsom is completely aware. Moreover, he’s positioned himself in recent months as a possible presidential contender on (not to) the left of the party’s center-left, a position that would be weakened if he doesn’t sign the bill.
On the other hand, he also knows that business interests vehemently opposed the bill, winning concessions in the final version and convincing a number of Democrats to vote against it. (One such provision, reportedly pulled at Newsom’s request, would have made fast-food parent companies jointly responsible with franchisees for worker conditions.) He probably also suspects that they’ll attack him should he sign it, on the grounds that it will increase the price of food by some unspecified amount at a time when the price of food has been soaring. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that business won’t put a gazillion dollars behind an initiative campaign against the bill should Newsom sign it, predicting (never mind the absence of evidence) that it will induce levels of inflation unseen since they almost toppled the Weimar Republic. Fortunately, such a measure cannot be put before voters until November 2024, when, let’s hope, supply chains will be working better and inflation will have subsided.
Having gotten the bill through the legislature, Henry said that the union may well take sectoral bargaining on the road, mentioning New York and Illinois as states where such legislation might also pass. Happily—given the way big money has come to dominate the initiative process—neither state allows for initiatives.
