This is CalMatters political reporter Ben Christopher, filling in for Emily who is out sick. Feel better, Emily!

Fast food workers and labor advocates wrapped up two days of marching, chanting and mariachi playing around the state Capitol on Wednesday, part of years-long campaign for a legislative proposal that could transform California’s fast food industry.

The headline summary of Assembly Bill 257: It would allow a state board to set wages, hours and work conditions for the entire industry, supercharging the bargaining power of its more than 700,000 low-wage, mostly non-unionized workers.

But there’s more to the fast food bill if you peek under the bun.

As Jeanne Kuang of CalMatters’ California Divide team explains, the labor-backed bill would also put the corporations that own fast food chains — along with the individual franchise owners — on the legal hook for wage and hour violations. That has the potential to upend the business model upon which countless burgers have been sold.

Whether that’s a good thing depends on whom you ask:

• Janice Fine, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University: “How you hold the companies at the top of the food chain, who are really setting the terms and conditions of employment, responsible for the lower levels — California has been way ahead on that.”
• Jeff Hanscom of the International Franchise Association: “You’d be holding an entity responsible or assigning liability for things they don’t have control over.”

That’s only if the...

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