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SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

The Fast-Food Empire Strikes Back

One day after sectoral bargaining is signed into California law, the
industry announces a ballot measure to repeal it.

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,
the 2024 referendum would 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.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The Anti-Monopoly Fight Will Be in the States

A new task force aims to take on corporate power at the state and local
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