Courtesy of AP Newsroom.
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 being taken advantage of. Like how, for over a decade, California has required millions of its low-wage workers to pay for lobbying to suppress the wages of their fellow workers nationwide—without knowing it.
What organization convinced the most pro-worker state in the country to take money out of food service workers’ pockets to pay for anti-worker lobbying? And what would it take to lessen the grip of that lobbying, and make the minimum wage, which still falls significantly short of meeting the cost of living across much of the state, a true living wage?
In 2011, the California state legislature passed a law requiring all food service workers not only to take a food safety training course, but also to pay for this training using their own money. Lawmakers voted for the bill based on a public health justification. Food safety is indeed an important issue, 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,...
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