The Dirty Business of Undermining California Labor Rights
The FAST Recovery Act gives new rights to fast-food employees. Owners are determined to take them away.
A couple of weeks ago, my partner and I were approached by some people who were gathering signatures in downtown Oakland. They asked us if we wanted to help increase wages for workers, pointing to some of the text on the petitions they were holding. “Increase the minimum wage up to $22 an hour” … “prohibits retaliation against fast-food workers for making certain workplace complaints.” Sounds pretty good, right?
We asked to look at the document and read it more carefully before adding our signatures. After a quick Google search, I learned that the (potential) wage increases and worker protections listed on the document are part of AB 257, also known as the Fast Food Accountability and Standards (FAST) Recovery Act. This bill, which was signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Labor Day, has been called “one of the most significant labor law victories in recent years.” In addition to wage increases and worker protections, AB 257 calls for the creation of a state-recognized council to advocate on behalf of workers alongside franchise owners.
The day after AB 257 was signed into law, business owners in the fast-food industry set to work calling for a referendum to repeal it. Here’s how Mary Kay Henry, President of the Service Employees International Union, describes these referendum efforts in her official statement:
In their fight for a voice on the job through AB 257, Black and Latino fast-food workers stood up to the wealthiest corporations in the world — and they won a landmark victory for working people everywhere. Now, in an act of extraordinary greed and cowardice, fast-food corporations are looking to buy their way out of a law intended to lift pay for their workers, ensure their stores are safe and healthy and improve the industry for everybody.
“The proposed referendum on AB 257 is nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to silence more than half a million fast-food workers in California and intimidate workers everywhere from demanding a seat at the table. This isn’t how companies act when they’re proud of their business model. It’s how they act when they’re terrified of their own workers and the power of collective action.
The signature gatherers who approached us were being paid by the organizers of this referendum. The only problem was, they thought they were gathering signatures in favor of workers’ rights, not against them. When we had finally pieced together what the referendum was actually about, their faces fell. They thought they were getting paid to gather signatures for a cause they believed in, and now they were faced with a difficult choice—continue to get paid to gather signatures for a referendum that undermines workers’ rights, or call it quits and walk away from a lucrative gig. “We have a lot to think about,” one of them said, and we wished them well.
Since that evening, I have been approached at least a half dozen times by people gathering signatures for this referendum. Every time, they have opened with some version of “Would you like to sign a referendum to increase the minimum wage to $22?” When I spend a little bit of time talking to them, it becomes clear that they believe they’re gathering signatures for an initiative that will help fast-food employees earn $22 an hour.
After encountering a few more of these signature gatherers, I figured they must all be answering an ad, so I went home and browsed Craigslist. I quickly found an ad offering $10 per signature for a referendum to “help save jobs.” I called the phone number on this listing and pretended to be interested in gathering signatures, and asked what the referendum was about. The person who answered the phone told me that the purpose of the referendum was to increase wages for all workers to $22 an hour. I asked what bill the referendum was aimed at overturning and he wouldn’t tell me. Then I came clean and told him that I knew what bill it was about, and that I had called him because I had encountered multiple signature gatherers giving me the same line he had just given me—essentially lying to people about the purpose of the referendum in order to get them to sign it. He insisted that he wasn’t lying, but quickly changed his approach, asking me “Why is it fair for fast-food employees to make $22 an hour when people in other industries don’t?” I told him I thought it was a great idea to increase wages for all workers, and asked why he didn’t work to get that on the ballot. He told me that the first step was to repeal the existing law. When I asked why he couldn’t work to increase wages for all workers without overturning these protections for fast-food employees, he hung up on me.
Today at the Grand Lake Farmers’ Market in Oakland we saw dozens of people gathering signatures for the referendum. When one of them asked me if I wanted to sign his petition, I started to talk to him about the referendum and its real purpose. At this point, a person who appeared to be in charge of the signature gatherers rushed over and told me to leave him alone or she was going to call the police. After she made that threat and pulled out her phone, I began filming our interaction. Unlike the other signature gatherers I had encountered so far, this person believed in the referendum’s true mission, insisting that fast-food restaurants shouldn’t have to offer employees a living wage or workplace protections because working for a fast-food restaurant isn’t a “real job.”
This person also claimed that the referendum “helps small businesses.” This is a woeful misconstrual of the actual wording of AB 257, which will only impact chain restaurants with “100 or more establishments nationally that share a common brand.” As organizer and Los Angeles Carl’s Jr. worker Sandro Flores put it,
This isn’t about small businesses. It’s about some of the richest companies in America using their hefty pocketbooks to subvert democracy.
After this exchange, my partner and I went on our regular rounds buying our groceries for the week. We found out from one of the vendors we spoke with that he had signed the referendum believing that he was signing something in favor of raising the minimum wage to $22 an hour. This sleight of hand is no accident. Organizers of the referendum effort know that workers’ rights are popular in California. The only way they can convince voters to take them away is by intentionally obscuring the referendum’s true purpose. Here, followers of California politics may recall Prop 22, a 2020 ballot initiative that used similarly deceptive tactics to strip rights from drivers working for rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. (Prop 22 has since been ruled unconstitutional.)
Those behind the referendum know that workers’ rights are popular in California. The only way they can convince voters to take them away is by intentionally obscuring the referendum’s true purpose.
In order to appear on the November 2024 ballot, the referendum to repeal AB 257 needs approximately 623,000 signatures by early December, and it seems as though the big money interests behind it will stop at nothing to get them. Even if the law is not repealed by voters, the creation of a ballot initiative will delay implementation of the law, which is currently scheduled to take effect in January 2023. According to one expert, this is exactly the point:
The main point of the referendum, says Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of Santa Barbara, Director of the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy, is stalling the entire process. “You create a delay, It puts the whole thing in stasis.” The industry doesn’t like the law because, Liechtenstein says, “it creates leverage to build people-power.” [Source]
I’m writing this in hopes of helping to raise awareness about these dirty tactics, because right now it seems like these signature gatherers are everywhere, and many of the California voters I’ve talked to (as well as the signature gatherers themselves) seem to be unaware of what this referendum is actually about.
If a referendum to repeal AB 257 was actually what Californians wanted, its wealthy backers wouldn’t have to misrepresent its purpose to make it happen.