California fast-food council stalls, leaving Taco Bell workers in limbo

California’s fast-food council was supposed to keep wages and working conditions moving for workers like Taco Bell crews. Instead, the body has gone quiet for more than a year, with no chairperson in place and no meeting to advance the rules that could shape pay, safety, and day-to-day operations in restaurants across the state.

That matters because this is not a symbolic panel. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1228 on September 28, 2023, raising the hourly minimum wage for certain fast-food workers to $20 effective April 1, 2024, and creating the Fast Food Council inside the California Department of Industrial Relations. The law applies to fast-food chains with 60 or more locations nationwide, which includes Taco Bell. It also gives the council power to raise the minimum wage annually starting January 1, 2025, by up to 3.5% or the CPI-W, whichever is smaller, and to set standards on wages, health, safety and working conditions.

The council first met on March 15, 2024, in Oakland after Newsom named Nicholas Hardeman chair on March 1, 2024. Hardeman later was appointed to the California Housing Finance Agency Board of Directors on May 22, 2025. After he stepped down in May 2025, the council went dormant, and the Department of Industrial Relations says the body cannot meet without a designated chair. Workers organized by SEIU are now pressing Newsom to fill the post so the council can get back to work.

For Taco Bell employees, the freeze leaves concrete questions hanging. Crew members do not know when the next cost-of-living increase might arrive. Shift managers cannot plan cleanly around future rules on meal breaks, safety practices or station assignments. Restaurant managers and franchise operators are left budgeting against a labor standard that could change, but has no active forum to do so. One worker described aches, pain and retaliation after speaking up, a reminder that the council was supposed to address not just wages but the strain of the work itself.

The politics around the board are already sharp. In January 2025, more than 40 franchise owners attended a council meeting to oppose further wage increases, and more than 1,000 local restaurant owners later wrote to Newsom urging the council to reject additional hikes. SEIU says the California Fast Food Workers Union, launched in February 2024, has organized hundreds of workers and says the policy has helped more than half a million people. But with the council stalled, the next round of standards is stuck in limbo, and Taco Bell workers are left waiting for Sacramento to decide whether the road ahead means higher pay, stronger protections or more of the same.