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Wage War: State budget reboots labor commission

Jeanne Kuang

Jul 10, 2023

Wage War: State budget reboots labor commission

Folded into California’s $310 billion budget agreement is a relatively small line item: $3 million to resurrect an obscure old state commission that once regulated industries from factories to farms to laundries—and even had the power to set the minimum wage.

The budget deal between the legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom would reconvene the Industrial Welfare Commission, dormant since 2004, to issue new rules on wages and working conditions for specific industries.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s similar to what labor groups tried to institute for California fast food workers last year, with the passage of a law to create a state-run council governing the industry.

Business groups quickly put that law on hold, pouring millions into a referendum campaign shortly after Newsom signed it last fall. Whether the state convenes a new fast food council—which would be empowered to raise the minimum wage in fast food to as much as $22 an hour—is now up to the voters in November 2024.

But using a state-appointed board to issue industry-specific labor regulations was no new idea in California. The state’s Industrial Welfare Commission did just that for most of the 20th century, before it was defunded in 2004. Without funding, the commission hasn’t met or operated, but it’s still a part of state law. The new, tentative budget deal would bring it back.

Business groups were quick to criticize this funding proposal in June, calling it a “backdoor” way for the state to start issuing rules for fast food despite the pending referendum.

“This budget bill is undemocratic and a shameful attempt to silence California voters,” said International Franchise Association CEO Matthew Haller in a statement.

The budget bill doesn’t specify an industry for the new Industrial Welfare Commission to focus on, but does direct it to prioritize industries in which 10% or more workers live below the federal poverty line—for which fast food likely qualifies.

Asked for comment, Service Employees International Union, which pushed for the fast food law, did not say whether they want a new commission to convene specifically for fast food. In a statement, SEIU California president David Huerta praised Newsom and lawmakers for “listening to workers and taking the bold action needed to make progress against a growing tide of inequality and poverty experienced by low-wage workers and people of color.”

The union’s close ally, Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles politician who leads a budget subcommittee on labor, said lawmakers have heard workers across industries testify that they can’t afford the basics despite working full time or more.

“Some of these industries already have wage orders,” Durazo said. “It’s just a matter of looking at them (again) … It’s not just fast food.”

Newsom administration officials did not respond to a request for comment.

The bill only allows about 10 months—right up to about a week before next November’s election—to issue new rules on wages and working conditions. Longtime Capitol lobbyist Chris Micheli said given that tight timeframe, a new commission could only focus on a few industries that fit the poverty description, with fast food being likely.

In the current budget bills, the new Industrial Welfare Commission would not be allowed to issue labor rules that are less protective of workers than current law.

That raised the ire of business groups. In a statement last week, the California Chamber of Commerce, state Restaurant Association and other groups denounced the limitation, saying it “will only create unnecessary confusion, create layered burdens on employers, and subject businesses to more frivolous litigation.”

Ironically, it was labor groups that pushed to disband the commission nearly two decades ago.

Created in 1913, the Industrial Welfare Commission was California’s version of “wage boards” that were common methods of setting labor standards across several Northern states during the Progressive Era. The commission was initially tasked with regulating labor in industries employing many women and children, the marginalized workers of that era who had neither union representation nor the ability to vote for stronger labor protections on their own.

The commission includes five members appointed by the governor: two representing employers’ interests, two representing labor’s interests and one representing the “general public.” It met in public, received comments and issued rules by industry in the form of wage orders.

In later decades, it expanded in scope to cover virtually every occupation.

The commission’s wage orders covered industries such as manufacturing, timber, agriculture, motion picture production, canneries, transportation and personal services. They regulated such working conditions as the length of breaks, overtime pay, the provision of seating and water for workers and whether employers had to provide uniforms if they were required.

Setting the statewide minimum wage was the commission’s most high-profile responsibility. One of its most famous moves was to grant farm workers the right to overtime pay in the 1970s.

It was as susceptible as any Sacramento body to political influence. In the 1990s, then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed labor representatives to the commission that labor groups opposed, said Catherine Fisk, a UC Berkeley labor law professor.

The commission made the controversial move to roll back daily overtime rules—the requirement that employers pay extra for more than eight hours of work per day. Lawmakers later reinstated the overtime rules on their own.

Dormant

Labor groups ultimately decided the commission wasn’t serving workers. At the urging of the California Labor Federation, lawmakers in 2004 zeroed out the commission’s funding, according to news reports.

Since then, the commission has lain dormant—other than a brief revival in 2006 under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was deadlocked at the time with the Democratic-led legislature over how much to hike the minimum wage.

The state labor commissioner still enforces the commission’s old wage orders. The legislature has become the primary body for writing new labor rules. Fisk said that’s not the best set-up for workers or the economy.

“It might be that the minimum wage should be $24 an hour in some occupations, but in others, that’s too high and it would cause harm,” she said. “That’s an empirical question that should be studied based on sociological and economic analysis, which the legislature is not set up to do as well as an expert body.”

Whether a resurrected Industrial Welfare Commission focuses on fast food or another industry, UC Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein said it makes sense for the board to return.

The conditions and diminished clout of low-wage workers today, he said, in some ways mirror those of the women and children laboring in canneries and garment factories in the 1910s.

“Labor law is pretty ineffectual; labor organization is very very low,” Lichtenstein said. “You have (workers) who are only semi-citizens, whether they’re undocumented or marginalized. So we’ve sort of returned to the sociology of the Progressive Era.”

Norman Solomon reveals America’s ‘invisible’ war machine

Will Carruthers

Jul 4, 2023

Norman Solomon reveals America’s ‘invisible’ war machine

When he announced the end of America’s war in Afghanistan in August 2021, President Joe Biden promised that America would continue its “fight against terrorism” worldwide.

“We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it,” Biden added. “We have what’s called the over-the-horizon capabilities which means we can strike terrorists or targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.”

The speech offered a concise pitch for a new era of America’s overseas wars, according to Norman Solomon, a longtime media critic and Marin County resident. In his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, Solomon argues that skewed news coverage of the country’s distant wars, along with pliant politicians, make ever-increasing military budgets seem almost inevitable.

The United States has 750 military bases around the world and is conducting counterterror operations in 85 countries around the globe. In 2022, the country’s military bill accounted for 51% of its federal discretionary budget while many Americans’ standards of living continued to fall.

“What happens at the other end of American weaponry has remained almost entirely a mystery, with only occasional brief glimpses before the curtain falls back into its usual place. Meanwhile, the results at home fester in the shadows. Overall, America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see,” Solomon writes in the book’s introduction.

The author of 12 books since 1982, Solomon has taken on America’s war industry before. However, his last book, Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, was published just over 15 years ago.

Asked why he revisited the topic now, Solomon said, “Our society has become numbed, desensitized and, in many ways, dehumanized to what’s being done in our names with our tax dollars. So, War Made Invisible is a book that flushes out into the open what’s hidden in plain sight.”

As referenced in Biden’s 2021 speech, technology is one factor at play. Over the past 15 years, drones and other tools of remote warfare have become more common, reducing one of the domestic political repercussions of past wars: dead American soldiers.

Another theme of War Made Invisible is the comparison between the media treatment of different victims of wars.

“[After 9/11] America’s dead and bereaved were vastly and appropriately important. In contrast, the deaths and bereavements of equally innocent people, due to U.S. military actions overseas, were devalued to such an extent that domestic politics perpetuated two tiers of grief: momentous and close to meaningless; ours and theirs,” Solomon writes.

During the first two decades of America’s “war on terror,” 7,050 U.S. soldiers and over 387,000 civilians were killed in direct violence by all parties involved in various conflicts, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Over the same period, an estimated 38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.

Those civilian deaths are the unintended, but predictable, result of American policies, argues Solomon. He compares the problem to what would happen if an American city allowed its police force to shoot their guns into storefronts and homes while pursuing a suspect. Innocent bystanders would be killed even if they weren’t intentionally targeted.

Solomon also compares the coverage of the United States’ recent military actions and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“When American armed forces are inflicting the carnage, the chances of deeply sympathetic coverage of the killed, wounded and bereaved are greatly diminished—but when the killers are adversaries of the U.S. government, the media floodgates of compassion and human connection open wide. Such selective empathy was on display as Ukraine withstood the barbaric Russian assault,” Solomon writes.

“Setting aside the double standards of political coverage of the Ukraine invasion and refusal to really go into the history of NATO expansion militarily up to the Russian border, the U.S. media coverage of the Ukraine war on the ground, I think, has been very good,” Solomon said in an interview. “It has poignantly, often powerfully, brought forward the human suffering as a result of an invasion by one country against another. The flipside, though, is that that quality coverage was inconceivable from major U.S. media outlets during the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S.”

Since the publication of his last book in 2007, Solomon has spent much of his time attempting to push the Democratic party left. In 2008, Solomon was a delegate for Barack Obama (a subject of critique in War Made Invisible), and later served as a delegate for Bernie Sanders during his two presidential runs.

In 2012, Solomon ran for a seat in Congress representing California’s second district, which stretches from Marin County all the way to the Oregon border. After 18 months of campaigning, Solomon won 14.9% of the vote in a primary election, narrowly losing second place to a Republican candidate.

Jared Huffman, then a state Assemblymember, won the Democratic party’s endorsement and, later, the election by a wide margin. He has held the seat ever since.

Last year, RootsAction.org, a progressive organization Solomon co-founded in 2011, launched the “Don’t Run Joe” campaign, an effort to discourage President Joe Biden from running for re-election due to his policies and low poll numbers, particularly among younger voters.

The “Don’t Run Joe” effort did not work—Biden announced his 2024 campaign this April—and the campaign was renamed “Step Aside Joe” in late June.

“As the 2024 election has neared, Biden has tacked increasingly to the right and toward corporate donors in pursuit of mythologized swing voters, while alienating the younger voters, people of color and working-class voters who defeated Donald Trump in 2020. Biden said he would be a steward of the environment, but he has repeatedly given the green light to fossil fuel drilling and pipeline construction, among several new projects in recent months. Biden said he would be a champion for working Americans, but has sided with corporations over workers in labor disputes,” the campaign said in a statement last week.

Now, with Trump also a declared candidate, the country is facing a bitter rehash of the 2020 presidential election.

Solomon is one of the many Americans left without a candidate they are passionate about. Despite participating in many of the contentious struggles between progressive and moderate elements of the Democratic party over the past decade plus, Solomon is opposed to third party runs and says he is not a fan of either of the Democratic candidates opposing Biden—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marianne Williamson.

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Solomon has two upcoming virtual book events.

The first will be hosted by Pt. Reyes Books on Tuesday, July 11 at 5pm. More information is available at ptre yesbooks.com/event/norman-solomon-virtual.

San Francisco’s City Lights Books is hosting another virtual event on Monday, Aug. 14 at 6pm. More information is available at citylights.com/events/norman-solomon.