Zocalo Public Square
The story of California’s minimum wage laws is often told as a story of progress. As of January 1, 2023, the state holds the third highest minimum wage in the country. All employees, including tipped workers whom most states exclude, make $15.50 per hour here. But such a narrative obscures the ways that low-wage workers are still taken advantage of.
Like how, for over a decade, California has required millions of low-wage workers to pay for lobbying to suppress the wages of their fellow workers nationwide—without knowing it.
In 2011, the California state legislature required all food service workers to take a food safety course, and pay for this training themselveves. Food safety is important, but something more nefarious was at work. My colleagues at One Fair Wage, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of the workers the law targets, and I recently discovered that the National Restaurant Association—the restaurant industry’s largest lobbying group—spearheaded the legislation in order to increase its lobbying budget.
In early 2023, the New York Times reported that the NRA owned the food-handler training company called ServSafe, which held a near monopoly over this kind of training, and planned to fill their lobbying coffers from the course fees. At least one-seventh of the association’s $25 million lobby budget since 2010 has come from California workers.
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