California gave fast food workers a seat at the table. What comes next?
Before California's fast food workers get a minimum wage hike to $20 an hour in April, the state will grant them another historic avenue to advance their interests.
A first-in-the-nation fast food council will offer workers and labor advocates a way to set industry working conditions, hammering out rules directly across the table from franchise owners and representatives of restaurant chains such as McDonald's and Burger King.
The council is supposed to start meeting by March 15, and its decisions will be sent to state labor agencies to decide if they'll become real regulations. Gov. Gavin Newsom will have a hand in how the discussion plays out: He's responsible for appointing seven of the council's nine members; legislative leaders will appoint the other two. The positions are unpaid, except for $100 per day for council business.
The council will be split, 4-4, between business and labor. Newsom will pick the chairperson, who is “unaffiliated” with fast food businesses or workers — and could end up regularly being a tie-breaking vote. The governor's office is interviewing applicants now, a spokesperson said.
Labor advocates see the council as a way to decide workplace standards in an industry with scant union representation and multiple kinds of companies involved — including the franchise owners who employ the workers, and the large chains that dictate various aspects of production.
In recent years, the labor movement has also sought industry-wide councils for nursing home workers in Minnesota and nail salon workers in New York, borrowing from a European method of bargaining with employers that is uncommon in the U.S.
California is the first to convene a council for fast food, a sprawling industry employing mostly workers of color and women, who earn on average less than those in other service sectors. More than 500,000 people are employed in more than 30,000 limitedservice restaurants in California, according to federal data; the council will govern those that belong to chains with 60 or more locations nationally. With many franchise owners running multiple restaurant locations, SEIU estimates about 3,000 separate employers will be covered
The council, said SEIU California president David Huerta last year when Newsom signed the law creating it, puts “power in the hands of workers to improve conditions across their entire industry.”
It's also a five-year experiment in how to regulate businesses in general across California — by returning to a model from the past.
For most of the 20th century, the state's now-dormant Industrial Welfare Commission — a similar, but more powerful council with labor and business representatives — convened wage boards specific to certain industries. The boards took testimony from workers and employers and wrote work standards in those industries.
Lawmakers did away with the commission two decades ago, after unions complained it had been seized by business interests to pass regulations that were less protective of workers' rights. Now, labor laws are almost all passed by the Legislature, which former commissioners from both business and labor say is less responsive to an industry's specific needs.
Though business groups have pushed back on the idea of industry-specific labor boards, lawmakers have signaled they're interested. Last year, during negotiations between the fast food industry and labor groups, the Legislature briefly resurrected the old commission, with a focus on industries with high levels of worker poverty.
“It is likely we'll see a continued push for both more sectoral labor standards” such as minimum wages specific to the fast food or health care industries, said UC Berkeley Labor Center co-chairperson Ken Jacobs, “as well as the use of labor standards boards in certain industries, where the structure of the industry makes traditional collective bargaining more difficult.”
Former industrial welfare commissioner Barry Broad, a former lobbyist for unions who now sits on the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Board, recalls convening wage boards that would discuss specifics such as tipping practices in hospitality jobs, the length of shifts in nursing and how cement mixers almost universally took lunch breaks in the cabs of their trucks. He sees promise in creating such a forum that gets deep into details, for fast food work or other sectors.
“When you have something which is industryspecific like this … you'd get a consensus about how the work was organized and what the customs were” across that industry, Broad said in an interview. “There was a common understanding, and it led to compromise.”
More fights ahead?
But after more than two years of a dizzying political fight between business and labor over whether to even consider specific regulations for fast food, will the new council result in more of the same battles?
Broad said it's possible to reach consensus, depending on who gets on the council.
But his former colleague, Bill Dombrowski, a representative of employers on the industrial commission, remembered its meetings as being just as contentious as the business-labor fights of today.
“We jokingly referred to it as the Industrial Warfare Commission,” Dombrowski said, though he agreed that the process was preferable to business and labor going through the Legislature.
Appointed by then-Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, Dombrowski said he understood the commission would push through laborfriendly policies Davis had backed, such as returning to a rule of paying workers overtime for time beyond eight hours a day. But his role was to “try to make it