THE WORKPLACE - On Sept. 8, the Los Angeles City Council voted to get one step closer to expanding Fair Work Week to fast-food workers.
The original Fair Work Week ordinance (Article 185 of the Los Angeles Municipal Code) took effect in 2023. Under the code, certain employers must give workers 14-day advance notice of their schedules, 10 hours of rest between shifts, predictability pay guarantees and a good-faith estimate for schedules. That last part means that if a manager hires you with a plan for you to get 20 hours a week, they shouldn't regularly schedule you for only five without a legitimate and well-documented reason.
None of that applies to fast-food jobs. So fast-food workers alerted the council to why they should be covered under the FWW ordinance.
“Recently I noticed I was missing 15 hours in my paycheck,” said Teresa Yahuaca, who has worked at a Carl’s Jr. for more than 20 years. “[Before] my boss would always tell me that if I complained about my paycheck that I could be fired.” She added that her boss threatened to blacklist her from working at any other fast-food restaurant.
Maria Tellez, an employee at Yum Yum Donuts, had a similar experience. “I thought my boss could simply just let me go for whatever motive … For a long time, I believed that I did not have rights in the workplace.”
The proposed FWW ordinance would address that lack of knowledge by establishing in-person Know Your Rights training.
Restaurant owners spoke in opposition to the motion, especially that provision.
“We already spend one hour of crew training and two hours for management on sexual harassment training,” said Lawrence Cheng, whose family has eight Wendy’s restaurants. “Adding a mandatory eight-hour offsite class meeting is not reasonable for employees.”
Others echoed disapproval about training being held outside the workplace. And this is when the conversation moved beyond the simple worker-versus-capitalist dichotomy.
Chris Wilson and Matt Sutton both spoke against offsite training because they believe it is “repetitive” and “restrictive.” But Sutton and Wilson don’t operate a fast-food joint. Sutton works for the California Restaurant Association, and Wilson works for BizFed. Rather than manage physical capital, they manage symbols — they formulate lobbying campaigns and talking points.
But the fast-food workers had their own symbolic capitalists advocating for them, including Rosemarie Molina from UCLA. (The form and function of symbolic capitalists has recently been analyzed by Musa al-Gharbi in “We Have Never Been Woke” and by Tony Chamas in “The Genealogy of Wokeism.”)
Molina is a labor studies professor, and recently surveyed working conditions at Starbucks. “Two young women we met … have to deal with people in crisis every day. In the last six months, two people have died inside the Starbucks stores … In-person training, I am telling you as a professor, are the way to go.” When Molina emphasizes that she is a professor, she is telling us to trust that she knows best.
Being a professor or a lobbyist isn’t inherently bad or good. Still, a professor is not a restaurant worker and a business advocate is not a business operator. They might really want good for whomever they try to help. But symbolic capitalists need to make a living, and they benefit by securing high-status work for themselves.
This was obvious as Victor Tobar from the Worker Empowerment Community Network spoke in favor of in-person training for workers.
“[K]nowing you have rights is not always enough,” he began. Tobar went on to say that trust is a big part of whether workers ask for help. “Community-based organizations like ours are already building relationships with workers,” he said. The subtext is clear: groups like his can be hired to deliver the training. Tobar can be genuine about empowering workers while also advocating for a new policy that could fund his organization or a similar symbolic capitalist group.
Twenty-five-year Subway franchisee Amir Yazdi wasn’t a fan of that potential arrangement. He’s become increasingly skeptical since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the state started regulating his business more.
“When governments got involved in business, SEIU used that opportunity … to try to take a bite.” In addition to the pandemic, Yazdi believes his business shrank from more than 10 locations to only five due in part to union organizing and their “proxies in state and local governments.”
Yazdi and other restaurant owners like Cheng shared that deep revulsion to potentially having to pay for worker training that could go to worker empowerment organizations like SEIU or WECN-LA.
Yet Yazdi and Cheng didn’t seem to have a problem allying with Sutton and Wilson, whose symbolic capitalist organizations “take a bite” from small-business profits. Furthermore, Wendy’s and Subway bite off at least 4% and 8% of sales respectively, according to company filings and disclosures. And that’s before considering required advertising fees.
Another point that Cheng made was, “There are employees that won’t be physically able to go to classes like that. A lot of the people that we do hire are 16-year-olds … How do you expect their [parents] to take them to the class?”
Cheng didn’t mention how much time his employees spend commuting to his Wendy’s. But Denisse Mejia, an employee at the Santa Monica and Vine Starbucks, did tell the council — her work commute is three hours.
“Starbucks prioritizes … meeting unrealistic speed expectations,” Mejia said. “We all deserve to have a fair schedule and work-life balance.” Her requests to transfer to a closer store have so far been denied.
Although many of the comments seemed irreconcilable between employers and employees, there were two major costs that harm both groups — health care and leasing costs (rent).
“Now you propose to add even more regulations, so I’ll have to cut [workers’ hours] even more,” said Ron Ross, who has four Wendy’s. At first he sounded like a grumpy old miser. But then he threw a curveball. “I have employees asking to cut their hours because they make too much to qualify for Medicaid.”
Ross was hinting at a core socioeconomic tension: On one side is a business owner wanting to stay under the Affordable Care Act’s employee threshold, so they don’t have to offer health insurance. On the other side are low-income employees trying to keep their state health coverage by earning below a certain amount of money. This is a precarious balancing act that does no one good.
Amala Reyes agreed and seemed directly open to an alliance between small businesses and workers. “We’re fighting the wrong battle. Let’s fight … a system where employees sometimes ask for fewer hours because earning more hours can affect their medical benefits … SEI[U] employees and restaurant owners should be working together.”
That wrong battle is one in which small-business owners have to spend more time and energy onboarding and managing more part-time employees, while those employees are stuck with low income so they can see a doctor. The obvious solution for them both is to fight for single-payer health insurance. Small businesses could then hire more full-time employees, and those employees could earn more — everyone should be covered under single-payer health care.
Jason Hendifar, operator of 10 fast-food restaurants, identified the second common struggle for small businesses and fast-food workers. “California is already the hardest state to operate a small business in because of high costs … If the climate continues in this direction, when my leases end, I will be forced to close my locations.”
Fast-food restaurants spend around 5% of sales on rent and other occupancy costs, and about 6% in urban areas. That’s according to surveys by the National Restaurant Association, the national version of Sutton’s own organization.
Restaurant employees who rent also face high costs, especially since more than one-third of them are working part time, according to a January 2026 brief from Harvard’s Shift Project. Put that together with estimates that about 69% of renters who make under $50,000 a year in the county are paying more than half their income on rent and utilities (according to a 2025 USC report), and you have struggling employers and employees. Both would benefit by fighting to keep more of their hard-earned money away from landlords by limiting rent extraction.
After the public comment, the council discussed the potential ordinance.
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, representing the 13th Council District, acknowledged the value of small-business franchisees in the City of Los Angeles. Yet he asserted that overall, the fast-food industry takes a toll on workers today.
“A 2024 Harvard study found that 91% of fast-food workers in California are victims of labor violations. The average fast-food worker loses 16% of their income due to wage theft.”
Before the vote, the council made one notable amendment: There would be an option to have a virtual Know Your Rights training if an employee requests that option. The item passed with 10 yes votes and two no votes. The no votes were from Councilmembers Park and Lee; Councilmembers Blumenfield, Price and Rodriguez were absent from the meeting. The next step is for the City Attorney’s Office and other agencies to prepare an official addition to the Los Angeles Municipal Code that would extend Fair Work Week to fast-food workers. The council would then vote yes or no on the new code.
Near the end of his remarks, Soto-Martínez added, “… we can pass strong labor laws but … it is important that as workers come in they understand what their rights are … having interactive conversation is absolutely essential.”
Before the council acts on the final form of the item, would any members be open to conversations between small businesses and workers about their common struggles? What about the role that symbolic capitalists might play in the new policy? What rights are they each entitled to? Would Soto-Martínez, or an avant-garde thinker like Councilmember Padilla, be the champion for a transformation?
There is a real organizing opportunity to get us one step closer to single-payer health care and limits on rent, especially by supporting ownership instead. There is an opportunity to interact together beyond the oversimplified narrative of workers versus capitalists — to build a coalition that encourages the ingenuity and tenacity of small-business owners yet fairly empowers workers with knowledge and dignity. Are we up to the task?
(Lazarus Acre writes under a pseudonym to not jeopardize his current employment with the government, where he works as a self-aware symbolic capitalist.)
