When Carmen Ponce moved to the Bay Area from El Salvador about a decade ago, the 32-year-old began making ends meet by working at a small family restaurant. The mom-and-pop business “respected the rights of the worker,” Ponce said in Spanish. When she transitioned to a job at the fast-food chain El Pollo Loco in 2019, the change was stark. Ponce encountered a very different workplace, she said, one with hazardous conditions and managers who denied workers their breaks.
Ponce’s concerns about her colleagues’ health and safety grew so intense that she and a coworker filed an official complaint with Cal/OSHA, the state’s workplace health and safety agency, on April 26. The complaint accused the store’s management of neglecting various occupational health and safety hazards, including fire, flooding, sewage exposure and electrocution risks. Employees alleged incidents such as a fryer catching fire, persistent kitchen flooding from the ice machine and bathroom and machines short-circuiting and cutting off the kitchen’s electricity.
“We feel like we risk our lives every day going to work, and we are angry and scared that we have to work in an unsafe environment with slippery floors and the possibility of being electrocuted,” the complaint reads. El Pollo Loco issued a statement to El Tímpano saying the company “remains steadfast in our commitment to the safety and well-being of our team members and customers at all locations.”
“After our investigation, corrective actions have been implemented at the franchisee restaurant location to ensure compliance with Alameda County Health Department regulations.”
“I believe that there can be a change,” Ponce said at a rally in early May in front of the El Pollo Loco on International Boulevard in Oakland, surrounded by about a dozen colleagues. Standing under the eatery’s neon yellow and red sign, Ponce, slight and soft spoken, held a poster board that simply read: “Strike.” Speaking in front of the crowd of workers, Ponce explained her decision to come forward, citing the insecurity employees face: “violence, labor abuses, we work in areas that are not well-maintained. We ask for justice because we need it.” As she spoke, a few cars sped by the strikers on the busy thoroughfare, honking in support.
Fast food workers are people of color, immigrants. They’re a perfect target, because they’re a vulnerable community.
Maria Maldonado, organizer, Fast Food Workers Union
A week later, workers a few miles away walked off the job at McDonald’s on Jackson Street in Oakland, protesting a rodent infestation severe enough to warrant a comparison to a “plague” from line cook Marisela Garcia Lopez. She alleges watching sickly-looking rats lumber through the kitchen, frightening staff, and hearing the squeaks of baby rats in the ceiling. “I’m always in the kitchen cooking and the rats are there at our feet, passing by,” she said in Spanish. “I never imagined there would be rats in a place for food.”
These actions were part of a wave of strikes that swept across California’s fast food sector in May, as fast food workers, galvanized by a series of wins years in the making, fight for better pay and working conditions.
Statewide, hundreds of thousands of low-wage employees like Ponce and Lopez work in fast food, an industry predominantly staffed by women of color. Now, they may have more of a voice at the table.
Last month, after a protracted battle between labor advocates and industry leaders, a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect. The new law, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom last September, not only increased hourly wages but also established a pioneering Fast Food Council, composed of restaurant workers and fast food industry leaders with the authority to set additional pay increases and negotiate over workplace regulations.
Amid this legislative momentum, service industry workers ramped up their organizing. In February, fast food workers announced the formation of the California Fast Food Workers Union—the labor group that Ponce joined before filing the Cal/OSHA complaint. The union, which is backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), will push for higher pay and safer working conditions across the state’s massive fast food industry. The union is the first of its kind in the country, and will be able to advocate for industry-wide changes through the newly established Fast Food Council.
For California’s legion of 550,000 estimated fast food employees, fast food worker’s newly muscular power could help address some of the hazards and abuses long associated with the job, from wage theft to workplace violence, sexual harassment and lacking enforcement of existing labor standards, organizers say.
The demographic makeup of fast food workers—roughly 60% in the state are Latino, and nearly two-thirds are women, according to a 2021 report by the Labor Center at the University of California, Los Angeles—makes workers particularly susceptible to abuse, says Maria Maldonado, an organizer with the Fast Food Workers Union and a newly appointed member of the Fast Food Council. A separate study, by Harvard’s Shift Project, found that fast food workers earn substantially less than service sector workers in other statewide industries, taking home an annual income of around $31,050.
Support immigrant-powered news:
“Fast food workers are people of color, immigrants,” Maldonado explained. “They’re a perfect target, because they’re a vulnerable community.” The primary issues workers face on the job are wage theft and punishment for speaking out, Maldonado said. “Many times workers don’t get paid overtime,” she explained. “They work off the clock, they don’t take breaks, or they come to have lunch and work during lunch time. And lunch is not being paid. And when the workers complain, they get retaliated against.”
The UCLA Labor Center report paints a bleak picture of the industry. Nearly two-thirds of the more than 400 California-based employees polled reported wage theft violations; more than half faced unsafe working conditions; 43% experienced injuries ranging from burns and cuts to physical and sexual assault; and close to 60% were exposed to health and safety hazards. Of those who raised concerns with management, roughly one in four faced retaliation, such as reduced hours, pay cuts or worse assignments.
For Oscar Rodriguez, who works at the downtown Oakland McDonald’s where workers staged an early May strike, the most egregious workplace health and safety issue he says he has dealt with on the job is an infestation of rodents. Rodriguez alleges seeing dead rats on his shift, but said his complaints to management were ignored. “They didn’t do anything about it,” Rodriguez said. “They just acted normal.”
On May 1, Rodriguez and a colleague filed a complaint with Cal/OSHA, alleging frequent contact with rodents and feces in the kitchen, including rats on the grill and excrement near food supplies. Workers alleged that management threatened to punish those documenting the rodents and warned that public disclosure could lead to a shutdown and job losses.
After a workers’ rights training from the Fast Food Union, employees learned they had the legal right to report unsafe conditions and filed the complaint.
“This company is profitable because of our hard work, yet our wages are not enough to pay for the basics and you do not treat us with dignity or respect,” they wrote to management. “This company makes millions in profits and we know you can afford to pay us more and provide us with a safe and healthy workplace yet you refuse to do so. We are striking to demand the respect we deserve.”
In a statement, Joseph Wong, the franchise owner and operator of the McDonald’s Jackson street restaurant, said: “It’s very important to me as a small business owner in Oakland that my employees have a safe place to come to work. When we became aware of the issue, we immediately contacted pest control and continue to work with them.”
‘Finally, the workers got a seat at the table’
The labor and economic changes sweeping California’s fast food industry are the culmination of years of organizing, notably with the Fight for $15 movement, which coalesced around raising the minimum wage to $15 more than a decade ago. This campaign helped lay the groundwork for the minimum wage fight and the contentious negotiations between labor and industry leaders over the new fast food law.
After Governor Newsom signed a comprehensive bill in 2022 that would have raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $22 per hour and created a Fast Food Council to set workplace standards, the fast food industry put millions of dollars into a referendum campaign to overturn the law in the November 2024 election. The proposed referendum was ultimately taken off the ballot after business and labor struck a last-minute deal in September 2023, resulting in a bill that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour and established a scaled-back version of the Fast Food Council, with less power to regulate working conditions outright than the proposed 2022 bill. Newsom signed the legislation in September 2023, and along with state legislative leaders, appointed nine members to the council. The higher minimum wage took effect on April 1.
Although the final bill was narrower than the original, the Fast Food Council will have the power to set future wage increases and propose labor condition changes to the state’s Labor Department. The council resembles a form of collective bargaining common in Europe known as sectoral bargaining. Under this model, workers and employers negotiate to set standards that cover an entire industry, rather than a specific workplace or employer.
This approach, which is still rare in the United States, has the potential to be “impactful and transformative,” said Brian Justie, senior research analyst at the UCLA Labor Center. The council will allow marginalized fast food workers to participate in negotiations over wages, industry standards and working conditions—“a really significant structural shift that I think could, and hopefully will, be modeled in other industries to follow,” Justie added.
The California Fast Food Workers Union will also play a crucial role. While the organization won’t have the authority to negotiate contracts with individual employers like a traditional union, it will provide an avenue to lobby for working conditions across the industry, thanks to the newly established Fast Food Council.
The nine-member council includes a strong labor presence, with two appointees hailing from the the SEIU, which is backing California’s new Fast Food Union, and two fast food workers from McDonald’s and Jack in the Box. “Finally, the workers got a seat at the table,” Maldonado said.
The council’s agenda includes annual wage increases, improving labor conditions and protecting workers from at-will firings and erratic scheduling. “We are very hopeful that together we can find solutions, because workers deserve to work in safe conditions and get paid well,” Maldonado said. The formation of the council, she added, is historic because fast food workers “will be part of bargaining.”
The flurry of worker-led organizing motivated Ponce and her colleague Erica Cruz, the El Pollo Loco workers who filed the Cal/OSHA complaint, to make their concerns known. Initially, Ponce was hesitant to address her issues with higher-ups, fearing retaliation, but meeting representatives from the newly formed statewide Fast Food Workers Union changed her mind. “I know that I am now protected and that I have found people who are helping me learn my rights,” she said.
Cruz also found comfort in the union’s growing ranks. Cruz has been a steadfast presence at the restaurant’s Oakland location for a decade. Yet, until now, she had never voiced her concerns about the store’s working conditions to management. She attributed the decision to fear of having her hours slashed in retaliation for speaking out, or losing her job altogether. But with her daughter now grown and the financial pressures on her family eased, Cruz has finally freed herself from fears of retribution, she said in Spanish.
Cruz said she is not just advocating for herself, but for the workers who will fill her shoes when she moves on. “Maybe it will be my daughter,” she reflects, or “my niece. I want to ensure that she will work in a safe and respectful environment, with supervisors who treat her with dignity.”
