Lizzet Aguilar has worked at a McDonald’s in Los Angeles for 17 years. She’s never once been given a paid day off. She’s never taken a vacation. When her husband or nine-year-old son get sick and need her to care for them—or if she gets sick herself—she has to call out and lose a day’s pay. “Es difícil,” she says: It’s difficult.
Her wages are already low. She makes $16.78 per hour. “Estamos luchando día a día. Es difícil vivir en California,” says Aguilar: We live day to day. It’s difficult to live in California. But for many years she was afraid to speak up and join the Fight for 15, a national movement to raise the minimum wage that started with fast-food workers and has since seen 14 states and Washington, D.C., raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour, increasing pay for 26 million workers.
Then the pandemic hit and Aguilar’s boss didn’t give workers any hand sanitizer, gloves, or even masks. Six coworkers got COVID-19. “Ese me puso a decir, ‘Basta,’” she recalls: It pushed her to say, Enough. She got involved to protect herself and her family.
Now Aguilar will be part of the next evolution in the Fight for 15 movement: She and her coworkers will announce on February 9 that they are forming the California Fast Food Workers Union, which will be part of SEIU. Hundreds of workers from different fast-food companies will gather in Los Angeles to sign union cards.
It’s time, Aguilar and her coworkers decided, to become more formal members of a union and pay dues. It’s a fresh start, she says, on the road toward securing bigger gains.
The Fight for 15, started in 2012, was an effort for workers to act in many ways like a union—staging strikes, making demands—while sidestepping the challenges of organizing actual unions. This next evolution builds on that by creating a more formal structure and asking workers to pay dues, a way of building sustainability. In return, they will have access to a benefits package similar to what other union members receive.
The union will not be a traditional one involving an election certified by the National Labor Relations Board, and thus it won’t have the protection of federal labor laws that require fast-food employers to sit down and bargain a contract. To go that more traditional route, workers would have to organize store by store given the fractured nature of the industry—most fast-food locations are owned by separate franchises, not the corporate entities that run the brands, forcing workers to organize each location and bargain with each individual owner. It would be an arduous process: Starbucks workers, for example, have unionized 370 locations, but that’s out of more than 15,000. (Starbucks is also an anomaly in the industry because the coffee chain owns most of its stores.) Fast-food workers would also have to overcome high turnover rates and aggressive anti-union tactics from employers.
With an industry-wide union, workers can continue their membership even if they get a job in a different location or for a different company.
But California fast-food workers also have something unique that lends extra power to their effort: The FAST Recovery Act, signed into law in 2022, established a fast-food council that will be made up of workers and corporate representatives from the industry and will hash out standards for wages, benefits, and other working conditions. The union likens it to a venue for bargaining a contract en masse every three years, and membership in the union will give workers a democratic way to set the agenda that gets brought to the council and select members to participate.
Both the new union and the fast-food council get close to something common in Europe but yet to be seen the United States: sectoral bargaining. Under such a model, employees and employers across an industry negotiate conditions all at once, as opposed to company by company or location by location as dictated by U.S. law.
The California Fast Food Workers Union is a novel idea in this country, but not entirely new. In 2022, more than 100 workers signed membership cards with the Union of Southern Service Workers. That union is similarly is not seeking to hold NLRB elections but instead band together across the entire south and various low-wage industries—including fast food as well as retail, warehouse, and care jobs—to make common demands such as higher pay, paid sick leave, and better workplace rights. Their uphill battle is steeper, however, given that no southern states have created something akin to California’s fast-food council and therefore there is no formal mechanism to set standards in these industries. They’ll have to rely more on protests and strikes instead.
But other states have been crafting legislation that gets closer to sectoral bargaining, even if they can’t institute it per se because they’re preempted by the federal National Labor Relations Act. Five states have created some form of a works council: in Michigan and Minnesota for nursing home employees, in Colorado and New York for farm workers, and in Colorado and Nevada for home care workers. These councils, which directly involve workers in setting standards, can set floors for pay, hours, benefits, and even staffing and training requirements. That prevents a race to the bottom in which employers undercut competitors by shorting workers.
Come April, Aguilar and all other California fast-food workers will receive a raise to at least $20 an hour thanks to legislation signed into law last September. After that, “Puedo ayudar un poco más a mi hogar”: I can help my home more, she says, particularly with the rent. But Aguilar wants to secure bigger pay increases and more “respeto” on the job, including an end to discrimination and retaliation. With the new union advocating on the new council, “Nos escucharan,” she says: They will listen to us. “No esta terminado.” The fight is not over.