Members of the panel empowered to set the wages of California’s fast-food workers never quite got to the issue of pay during their second meeting, held Wednesday in Sacramento. Ditto for the list of suggested workplace changes that employee representatives had brought with them as a discussion guide of sorts. Or any employment topic of significance, for that matter, even though the session ran for more than three and a half hours.
Instead, the get-together of the California Fast Food Council quickly devolved into a gripe session. The heated talk likely had more of an impact on global warming than it did on employment conditions within the state’s restaurant business, the nation’s largest by far.
Not that those conditions weren’t brought up. During the open-mic portion of the meeting, one fast-food worker after another groused about the conditions they’re forced to endure, and they didn’t hesitate to name names. A young McDonald’s worker asserted that the Oakland store where he worked had been overrun by rats, yet, he said, management had refused to take action.
A number recounted how temperatures had soared to dangerous levels within their stores during recent heatwaves without any remedial actions being taken by their employers.
Yet the issues were raised as matters that should be addressed by the Council, and not as condemnations of fast-food employers. Indeed, the request aired most often by the employees who spoke was that the Council meet more frequently so all the pain points could be addressed. Several, including those workers who had seats on the Council, aired hopes that solutions could be hammered out through collaborative brainstorming by the employer and employee proxies on the panel.
One of the few concrete suggestions to emerge during the meeting was a recommendation that the Council visit fast-food restaurants as a group to get the perspectives of both worker and boss.
Employer representatives on the Council spoke more about process and how to ensure the group delivered on its mission of making the fast-food business a better place to work. The Council was formed through closed-door negotiations between the National Restaurant Association, the Service Employees International Union and the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom as a unique way of setting wages for employees of fast-food restaurants in the state with at least 59 sister units nationwide.
The founding law set a minimum wage for those employees of $20 an hour as of April 1, and required the Council to meet at least twice a year with an eye toward adjusting the rate. The pay floor can be raised by as much as 3.5% annually.
The Council is also expected to recommend changes in fast-food workplace rules to state regulators but lacks the authority to enact those adjustments. In contrast, it can set wages unilaterally.
Essentially, responsibility for setting a fast-food minimum wage was shifted from the state legislature to the Council, a first-ever move within California and the nation as a whole. Organized labor has said it views the situation in the Golden State as a “test of concept,” with acknowledged intent to duplicate the model elsewhere if it works on the West Coast.
Fast-food employers have blasted the setup because it limits their latitude for setting wages and takes the wage-setting function away from elected officials. All nine members of the panel—four representing labor, four serving as proxies for employers, and the ninth representing the state—were appointed, not voted into their seats.
Rather than relitigate the pros and cons of the Council, its employer proxies focused during Wednesday’s meeting on the panel’s operation. Much of the marathon session was spent in a discussion of how an executive director of the Council should be selected. Would he or she be arbitrarily selected by state officials who are technically not part of the group, or would Council members have a say?
The upshot was forming a subcommittee to choose the executive director, an individual who’d likely have considerable impact on how the group functions.
The most heated part of the meeting came in the back-and-forth between the employer representatives and Council support personnel from the California Department of Industrial Relations. The employers pointedly voiced frustration with limits that have been forced on the panel by a California law known as the Bagley-Keene Act.
The measure is intended to prevent backroom wheeling and dealing by requiring that any substantive meetings of a state agency take place in the public’s view. In practical terms, that prevents more than two members of the Council from meeting outside of official sessions and thwarts them from collaboratively researching problems and solutions.
Council Member and employer proxy Richard Reinis, whose family runs the West Coast Krispy Kreme franchise Great Circle Family Foods, said he fears the limits imposed by Bagley-Keene will keep the panel from fulfilling its mission.
“I didn’t join to prove this wouldn’t work. I don’t think any of you did so, either,” he said to the Council. “We need to communicate with one another. Ultimately, we need to trust one another. I think we’re off to a rocky start.”
The meeting recessed after the possibility was raised of convening another get-together in September.