Fast food is the largest employer of homeless workers in California, with one of 17 unhoused individuals in the state working in the industry.
That’s according to a new report released Monday by the Economic Roundtable, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit research organization. The report highlights how the fast-food industry’s low-wage jobs contribute to the state’s homeless crisis and proposes improvements to keep workers and their families housed.
The research found fast food workers make up 5.9% of California’s homeless population and 11% of all homeless workers in the state. The poverty rate for the households of frontline fast food workers is also roughly three times higher than the rest of the state’s workers.
“We need to raise the playing field…If we raise the expectations, the wage levels, the hours of employment for everyone in the industry, then it doesn’t hurt any company individually,” said Daniel Flaming, president of Economic Roundtable and lead author of the report. “But it makes the service they provide socially sustainable rather than a bottom feeder activity.”
Flaming argues if the industry provided sustaining pay and stable employment, there would be roughly 10,000 fewer homeless workers in California.
“That alone is not the sole solution to homelessness, but it’s a big piece of a solution,” he said.
Per the report, a fast food worker collects $59 per hour for corporations. The top five publicly traded fast-food corporations operating in California generated $12 billion in 2022.
“In a state with the fourth largest economy in the world, corporations are able to get away with paying poverty wages simply because we let them,” said Devon Gray, president of End Poverty in California. “And the reason they’re allowed to do this is because we’ve internalized classist and, often, racist notions of deservedness that say fast food workers and other low-wage workers don’t need to get paid enough to meet their basic needs.”
The report comes in the middle of an ongoing battle between labor advocates and the fast-food industry over a first-in-the-nation council that would set pay and working standards for fast-food employees in California.
The council would apply to any chain restaurant with at least 100 locations in the United States and could lead to a $22 per hour minimum wage for workers.
Gov. Gavin Newsom approved the council by signing the FAST Recovery Act last year on Labor Day. But the following day, opponents filed a referendum to halt its formation.
Paid signature gatherers would collect more than 1 million signatures over the next few months while facing accusations of lying and misrepresentation. Following a statewide count, 77% of the signatures were deemed valid and the referendum qualified.
The approval sets the stage for voters to decide the council’s fate on the November 2024 ballot. It also likely means a costly battle, with spending reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.
The labor organization Service Employees International Union, which has worked for more than a decade to organize in fast food restaurants, provided $50,000 to the Economic Roundtable to produce the independent report.
SEIU led a campaign in 2016 to push California to raise its minimum wage to $15. And most recently, the organization has advocated for a measure that would make fast food corporations liable for any health and safety violations of their California franchisees.
Currently, fast food companies are not legally responsible for any labor violations if individual stores are owned by franchisees.
