Every week we fire up the latest in time-travel gear and zoom back via our Restaurant Rewind podcast to a situation that’s loudly echoed in the restaurant business of today. But we’d be all the way back to caveman days with nothing to show but a souvenir club or two if our quest was finding a precedent to a situation that’s unfolding right now in California.
Restaurants have never been subject to anything like what’s seriously being considered for the state’s fast-food business. A proposal already passed by the Assembly and two committees of the Senate would fundamentally change the way employee wages, hours, benefits and workplace standards are set for that sector.
Instead of laws being passed, a 13-person council with equal representation of workers, employers and regulators would set those variables, subject to the veto or tweaks of the legislature. Specifically, two of the seats would be given to fast-food employees; two to union figures; two to officials of fast-food chains; and two to fast-food franchisees. The remaining five chairs would be occupied by representatives of state regulatory agencies.
It’s officially named the Fast Food Accountability and Recovery Act but is better known as the FAST Act, a nod to proponents’ argument that standard-setting for fast-food workers needs to be more immediate and agile than it currently is. The council would be required to hold hearings at least every six months to adjust the requirements, which would be binding only on fast-food employers.
The state legislation would permit any jurisdiction with at least 200,000 residents to set up the same sort of council to determine local standards. Every municipality or county of scale could bypass the usual lawmaking process to set new mandates.
If that sounds like something alien to the American government model, you’re not incorrect. The setup is virtually unknown in the United States. But in Europe, many industries are regulated by stakeholder councils. Many see them as alternatives or adjuncts to trade guilds and unions, and they exercise considerable authority.
What may be as startling as the substance of the bill is the muted reaction it’s drawn from the industry. Regardless of where someone might stand on how much say employees should have on their pay and other crucial employment matters, the FAST Act would be a profound change. State and national trade groups have been diligently pushing back against the proposal, with signs of some success, but the industry’s rank-and-file seems oblivious to how their world could mightily change.
Maybe that’s because the proposal is focused solely on the fast-food sector—or at least this iteration is. But even that community seems less than afire with apprehension. A side provision of the act is the designation of franchisors as joint employers of franchisees’ staffs, a watershed change that would greatly increase the brand owners’ vulnerability to lawsuits, sanctions and possibly unionization drives. That component alone should have every franchise chain yelping. Yet we’re not hearing that sort of broad outcry.
There’s also the sense that it’s California’s problem—the sort of New Age-y thing that could actually make it to the books there but would never fly in Iowa.
Yet rumblings of setting up a similar sort of council have already arisen in Michigan.
Plus, it’s not as if what happens in California tends to stay there. It’s often the nation’s lab for new sorts of legislation, from animal-husbandry standards to straw bans.
Hearings on the FAST Act are scheduled to be held by the state Senate Committee on Appropriations in August. We’ll be turning our eyes and ears to those procedures. Maybe you should, too.