As Gavin Newsom Builds His National Brand, Will He Leave California Workers Behind?

The room in San
Jose, California, went quiet when Perla Hernandez spoke about the trials she’d faced working
at a Burger King in Campbell, near the southernmost edge of Silicon
Valley. One afternoon, she said through a translator, she heard two people yelling
in front of her restaurant. When she went outside to see what was happening,
one of the men pulled a machete and raised it over his head to strike the other
person. The sight was especially terrifying for Hernandez, as it invoked a
childhood memory of seeing her father trying to kill her mother in the same
way. Crying and shaking with fear, she rushed to the store manager and asked
him to call 911, but the manager refused and told her to return to her station.
It was a busy afternoon, and, per usual, worker safety was a low priority
compared to filling orders of burgers and fries.

Hernandez was
one of dozens of mostly female Spanish-speaking fast-food workers from across
California who took a precious day off last month to
share their stories with self-described “progressive capitalist” Ro Khanna
and make the case for a state-level bill that could materially change their
lives. If it is signed into law, Assembly Bill 257, otherwise known as the FAST Act, would form
a council of fast-food workers and industry representatives and give it the
power to enact health and safety rules for fast-food workers throughout the
state. The bill passed the state legislature on Monday. Its next stop will be
the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom who, with a pen stroke, could turn it into
one of the most consequential pieces of labor legislation in decades.

Khanna’s call
to action might have been easier to ignore if the bill’s passage was more
certain. While the bill sailed through both chambers of the state legislature
with wide margins, Newsom has yet to announce his own stance. More concerning
for labor organizers are his recent positions on other progressive bills.
Earlier this month, he vetoed a bill that would have allowed the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, as
well as Los Angeles County, to open monitored injection sites for drug users,
as all four municipalities had requested. Days later, he declined to sign
another major labor bill unless it was changed in a way that organizers
consider antithetical to its purpose.

The latter
decision was something of a surprise. While Newsom had not announced a stance
on the safe injection bill, he had vetoed a version of the labor bill—which
would have made it easier for farmworkers to join unions—last year and
requested a list of changes, which the bill’s chief backers in the United Farm
Workers union had largely accommodated. Opposition now looks more like
backtracking, and the reason, California political observers suspect, comes
down to the governor’s national prospects. 

As mayor of San
Francisco and later as a gubernatorial candidate, Newsom was hailed as a
moderate on economic issues by the standards of the famously liberal state. But
as a leading member of the pool of Democrats under 80 who could best challenge
either Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump for the presidency in 2024, he’s had to
appeal to an electorate that’s wider and more moderate than the base of
California liberals who have carried his political career until now. If
President Biden chooses not to run for reelection, Newsom might have a place
waiting for him on the national stage. For progressives, and especially labor
organizers, the problem is that he’s stepping on their legislation to get
there.

California has
long had an outsize influence on American politics. As a huge state with all
the diversity and most of the same problems as the United States as a whole,
its policies have been touted as models for the rest of the nation for decades.
And as Democrats have stiffened their hold over the state’s government in
recent years, California’s political brand has only become more liberal, with
legislative battles in Sacramento now hinging on compromises between the
progressive and moderate wings of the same party, while Republicans have fallen
into near-total irrelevance. For progressives around the country, the sharp
tilt in the state’s balance of power has made it something like an alternate
version of the nation at large, where the legislative process actually leads to
bills and laws, up to and including the kinds of sweeping policies more
liberal members of Congress, like Khanna, favor but can’t pass themselves.

Yet instead of
ushering in that legislation, Newsom is instead burnishing his national
credentials by tamping it down—a fact that has left many in the labor movement
wondering what happened to the rising sense of possibility they felt not long
ago.

On Friday,
August 26, thousands of people rallied at the Capitol
building—including some fast-food workers who had already been camping there
in support of A.B. 257—as  United Farm
Workers members finished a 335-mile journey through the fields of California’s
Central Valley. After marching for three weeks, often in temperatures exceeding
100 degrees, the workers and their supporters asked Newsom to sign their own
bill, the Agricultural Labor Relations and Voter Choice Act, which would make
it easier for workers in California’s fruit and vegetable fields to join
unions.

There were
reasons to be optimistic. After Newsom vetoed a prior version of the bill last
year, the UFW had worked with his office to come up with something they could
agree on. Newsom had expressed support in principle. But despite the outpouring
of support, just hours before the marching workers arrived at the Capitol
building, the governor said he couldn’t sign without certain revisions. The UFW
compromised on most of them. But by the end of the day, with the window for
passage disappearing, the governor was still insisting on a provision ensuring
employers learn exactly when an organizing effort is afoot, starting from the
moment the ballots go out to workers. 

“[T]hat’s a
problem, given [employers’] documented history of intimidating and even
deporting workers who are known to support the union,” Sacramento Bee columnist Melinda Henneberger wrote of the news.
“Employers will eventually know when an election will be held, of course, and
they might even know it from the beginning.… But telling employers from the
outset when to coordinate with ICE—yes, this happens—would rob workers of
even a fighting chance to organize.”

As of now, the
bill looks like it’s headed for an unceremonious end, raising the prospect of a
similar fate for a fast-food labor bill.

From march to
rally, the UFW’s entire demonstration this summer was reminiscent of the 1966
march to Sacramento, which Cesar Chavez led in the union’s early days to
bring national attention to the plight of some of the state’s most important
yet most neglected laborers. That march was one of the first big gestures of a
long campaign that culminated nine years later when Jerry Brown, another
Democratic governor considering a presidential bid, signed the California
Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 into law, granting farmworkers the
right to join a union for the first time. It was a historic achievement for
farmworkers, much like A.B. 257 would be for fast-food workers. 

At the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York, where he nominated Brown for president, Chavez said, “For years and
years, millions of dollars were dumped into the farmworkers’ problems in
California and never solved anything until we were able to get a governor in
California who listened to us and gave farmworkers an instrument—collective
bargaining—so the workers can begin to deal with their own problems. Not until then did we start making headway.”