McDonald's workers push Newsom to revive stalled fast-food council

For McDonald’s workers in California, the fast-food council was supposed to be the place where the next round of wage and workplace rules got hashed out. Instead, the nine-member panel has gone more than a year without meeting and still has no chair, freezing a key part of the state’s landmark labor deal while crews keep working under the same pressures.

The council was created by AB 1228, which Gavin Newsom signed on Sept. 28, 2023. That law raised the minimum wage for certain fast-food workers to $20 an hour starting April 1, 2024, and gave the council authority to set future wage increases and develop standards, rules and regulations for the industry. The council sits inside the California Department of Industrial Relations, with four business representatives, four labor representatives and one unaffiliated chairperson, plus non-voting members from GO-Biz and the department.

The chair seat is the immediate problem. Newsom appointed Nicholas Hardeman on March 1, 2024, but state records later listed the chair position as vacant by August 2025 after he left for another state post. The full council met only in 2024, then held two subcommittee meetings in 2025, the last in February. Workers and labor advocates have since pressed Newsom to name a new chair so the council can get back to the work it was created to do.

That matters because the unresolved issues are the ones crew members feel on the floor every day: future wage floors, scheduling instability, paid time when restaurants are sold or closed, and standards for harassment, discrimination, wage theft and unsafe workplaces. The department also says the council’s resources are meant to help workers and employers with workplace-rights and compliance information, including workplace violence prevention, retaliation complaints and wildfire-smoke safety. When the council is stalled, those promises lose force.

The delay also gives operators more breathing room, especially after the industry’s own warning shots. A Sept. 10, 2024 letter from local restaurant owners, including McDonald’s franchisees among the signers, said the $20 wage had already pushed 98% of surveyed owners to raise prices, 89% to cut employee hours and 70% to reduce staff or consolidate positions. That tension is now playing out without a functioning council to absorb it.

California fast-food politics have already moved from a proposed $22 wage in 2022 to a compromise that reset the rate to $20 and created the council structure. With the chair seat empty, the next phase of that deal is stuck, and the gap between the headline agreement and the day-to-day reality for McDonald’s crews is getting wider.