Hundreds of fast-food workers gathered Friday, Feb. 9 in Los Angeles, rallying support for a newly created union aimed at ensuring adequate wages, increasing work hours and boosting workplace protections.
The California Fast Food Workers Union will be affiliated with Service Employees Union International Union, which powered the campaign to boost California’s minimum wage for certain fast-food employees to $20 an hour.
Also see: California raising minimum wage for 2 industries. Others could see pay hikes, too
Friday’s rally at the South Central Avenue office of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee was held as a membership drive for the new union, which supporters say is the first of its kind in the country.
One industry expert has called it a “fake union” with virtually no teeth.
It won’t be a traditional union involving an election certified by the National Labor Relations Board, so it will lack the protection of federal labor laws that require fast-food employers to sit down and negotiate contracts.
Also see: Starbucks faces mounting pressure from unions
To go the traditional route, they would have to organize store by store, many of which are owned by franchisees. That would involve a long and arduous process, as evidenced at Starbucks, where employees have labored long and hard to unionize 370 stores out of more than 15,000 stores.
“SEIU believes every worker has a right to join a union whether or not they have a collective bargaining agreement at their worksite,” supporters of the new union said. “A worker simply needs to fill out a union membership form.”
Michael Saltsman, executive director at the Employment Policies Institute, called the new union “fake” and said it lacks a funding mechanism and has “no apparent power beyond collecting feedback from the union’s existing supporters.”
“I would submit that they didn’t want to go store by store because they knew they couldn’t win store by store,” he…
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