California union alleges that fast-food effort to block new labor law is ‘willfully misleading voters’
A union representing fast-food company workers in San Francisco has accused the ballot measure of misleading voters about its effect on the union.
As part of its campaign to defend the city’s fast-food workers as members of the city’s union, Community Benefits Union (CBU) is asking to stop the “Food Chain Initiative” from the San Francisco-based Measure F.
The measure seeks to prevent new labor laws affecting fast-food, grocery and other retail workers. When passed, it will require the city’s mayor and city council to approve any labor laws over $20,000 annually.
Community Benefits Union
The ballot measure is supported by the Retail, Wholesale, and Other Workers Union (RWO), the San Francisco Firefighters Union, the United Farmworkers Action Coalition, San Francisco Restaurant Group, the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, San Francisco Baykeeper, and several anti-labor groups.
In addition, a number of anti-labor groups, including the California Jobsite Union, Progress Bay Area, Service Employees International Union 32BJ, Service Employees International Union San Francisco, and Jobs With Justice are urging voters to defeat the measure.
An initiative that seeks to restrict labor rights is misleading.
In an opinion blog for the Bay Area-based Community Benefits Union, Community Benefits Union national organizer Matt Lakin explains that the measure is misleading because it does not address the real problem in San Francisco: the city’s “factory farm wages for fast-food workers are among the highest in the country.”
Lakin told me the ballot measure’s failure to eliminate the exploitative industry and bring jobs and wages up to San Francisco’s level would cause a “significant blow to the city’s hard-won economic health.”
He also said the measure’s campaign was waged to “tarnish the good relationships” between restaurant workers and city leaders, and that it is “wrong” to ask city leaders to “dism