Fast-Food Workers Rally Behind Know-Your-Rights Initiative

Lourdes Farfan has seen a lot during the 19 years she has worked for various Jack in the Box restaurants in San Jose, California. New products have come and gone. Some customers have been polite, others irate. The country suffered through the Great Recession and a global pandemic. Her children, three of whom have worked alongside her at various times, grew into adults.

Until recently, however, there was one thing the 52-year-old had never seen: a single representative from the government checking on workplace conditions. She had never heard of the California Labor Commissioner’s Office, which enforces the state’s wage laws, or the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, also known as Cal/OSHA, the state agency in charge of workplace safety. “I didn’t know anything about my rights,” Farfan said. “And so I did what everyone else did: I stayed quiet.”
 

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That changed in 2022, after a representative of the Service Employees International Union stopped by the Jack in the Box on Curtner Avenue while Farfan was working. Armed with new information and confidence, she contacted Cal/OSHA, the state-run OSHA agency, to complain about sewer water that came up from the floor tiles and made her nauseous, sometimes sending her home with wet shoes and headaches. A Cal/OSHA inspector appeared, and the agency fined her employer $3,600 after finding four violations — which are logged in a federal OSHA database — including one for violating the “general duty clause,” a requirement that workplaces be free from hazards “that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” 

The owner of the Jack in the Box in question was Ali Navaie, a franchisee in Nevada whose company was called Golden State Jacks Inc. Navaie sold the company in December. He said that every violation at the store had been fixed and that he didn’t recall any major problems that had caused workers to become sick. “If there was something major, normally [Cal/OSHA] would close the restaurant,” he said. 

Farfan said the flooring was fixed and new protective equipment was supplied to the workers. Farfan was transformed, too, joining the union’s successful statewide campaign to raise the minimum wage of fast-food workers to $20 an hour.

Lourdes Farfan at a protest in support of Taco Bell and KFC workers. Photo: Gabriel Thompson.

Now she’s emerged as a leader in a new campaign, which SEIU launched in San Jose and Los Angeles, focused on passing local ordinances that mandate know-your-rights training for fast-food workers. “Everything changes when you have information,” Farfan said. “Now I ask for something from my employer, and they say, ‘Where’d you learn that?’” (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

For SEIU, the training — envisioned as a one-day annual event provided by a nonprofit third party — is critical to ensure that workers know the laws that exist to protect them. Employers would be required to pay for both the training and the workers’ time, likely costing them at least several additional hours of paid time per employee each year.

A recent report by SEIU and the Step Forward Foundation, which provides training to low-wage workers, surveyed 300 fast-food workers in California last year and found that 88% were unable to correctly answer a majority of questions about basic workplace rights. 

In San Jose, where the union first floated the training idea, the initiative has sparked fierce pushback from the industry. Opponents argued that fast-food establishments have low rates of labor violations and that the industry is already reeling from increased labor costs after a state-mandate minimum-wage jump in April. Representatives of the fast-food industry have claimed that the wage increase resulted in thousands of jobs being slashed, food prices increasing and restaurants going out of business, though such claims have been disputed. 

Leading the charge against any new ordinances is a coalition called Save Local Restaurants, which also opposed the minimum wage increase. The coalition is led by the International Franchise Association, the National Restaurant Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major fast-food brands. Kathy Fairbanks, a partner with Bicker, Castillo, Fairbanks & Spitz, a prominent public relations and lobbying firm in Sacramento, serves as a spokesperson for the group. 

She noted that California already has the strongest labor laws in the country and that those pushing for new ordinances have created “a proposal in search of a problem.”

In San Jose, the industry has mounted a vigorous effort to stop the campaign. According to city lobbying records, lobbyists for Save Local Restaurants have contacted city officials more than 130 times so far this year through phone calls, emails and meetings. During the same period, San Jose-based Willco Management Inc., which owns a group of McDonald’s, contacted officials more than 150 times. McDonald’s Corp. own lobbyist, Jessica Nyman, contacted officials eight times.

Thus far, the lobbying effort has succeeded in thwarting a new ordinance in San Jose. The union hopes that an ordinance will be introduced soon in Los Angeles that, if passed, would mandate training to all fast-food workers in the city. Although California’s new minimum-wage law creates a Fast Food Council made up in part of fast-food workers, the union sees local ordinances as a way to dramatically scale up the number of workers educated and empowered about their rights. 

Opponents of know-your-rights proposals point to a report by the Employment Policies Institute, which analyzed wage claims filed with the state from 2017 to 2022 and found the fast-food industry accounted for just 1.6% of claims while representing 3.2% of California’s workforce (they also noted potential miscategorization of the industry by the state could raise the wage claim rate from 1.6% to 2.3%). According to the report, the annual rate of wage claims in fast-food was up to five times lower than that of other industries. (The Employment Policies Institute, which describes itself as a “non-profit research organization,” was reported by The New York Times in 2014 as being run by a public relations firm that also represents the restaurant industry.)

The lack of claims doesn’t necessarily signify a lack of violations, according to a recent report by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the University of California, San Francisco. Based on surveys of nearly 1,000 service workers in California, including fast-food workers, researchers found that 91% reported experiencing at least one labor violation during the past year, with about two in five reporting wage theft.

But the report also identified what it called a “complaint gap.” Among workers who reported a violation, fewer than one in four said they made a complaint to a coworker, manager or agency. Of those who did lodge a complaint, a scant 2% took their complaint to a state regulatory agency. “California has work to do in supporting workers in understanding their rights, knowing what to do when these rights are violated, and protecting workers from retaliation when they do lodge a complaint,” the report concluded.

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Last November, Farfan fell ill after working at the Jack in the Box on Curtner Avenue, where she said sewer water was again starting to seep up through the tiles. (An additional complaint she filed with the state led to Cal/OSHA levying $750 in fines on the restaurant for another two violations, though neither was about sewer water issues). She texted a manager at the second Jack in the Box where she worked, on Capitol Expressway, and explained that she was sick and had diarrhea. (The two Jack in the Boxes are run by separate franchisees.) The manager replied that she should still come in because they were short-staffed and followed up with several more texts, one that implored her not to be late.

At home, Farfan grew increasingly sick and fell asleep after taking medicine. Her daughter sent a text to the manager: “Hi, my moms sleeping, and still sick, I’m sorry but I don’t think she’ll be able to go to work today.” The next text Farfan received from the manager announced that she was suspended indefinitely. 

The following week, Farfan filed retaliation and wage theft complaints with the state, alleging that she was suspended because she had called in sick and was also wrongfully denied sick pay. Dozens of fast-food workers, traveling from as far away as Sacramento, joined her for a loud protest in front of the store. According to Farfan, she received a call from the company’s district manager during the protest, who said he would fix any problems if she came to work the following day. The next day, she said, she was reinstated and paid for the sick day and the days she had been scheduled to work during her suspension. Meanwhile, her formal complaints against her employer remain open. 

Capital & Main was unable to reach Farfan’s employer, LJ & MW Enterprises, whose CEO is Larry Jones, despite repeated attempts. 

“I had no idea it would work so quickly,” she said with a smile. For Farfan, the episode underscored two points: Workers need to know their rights, but they also need support from other workers. Farfan recounted her story on a warm and breezy June afternoon in front of a Taco Bell and KFC location in East San Jose, where she had gathered to support two workers on strike. About 50 workers crowded the store entrance, waving flags and chanting. “The companies need to understand that more and more workers are going to learn their rights, and we’re not going back to being quiet again,” Farfan said.

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