As he prepares for a possible presidential run, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has burnished some of his progressive credentials with a flurry of new legislation. On Monday, he rattled the fast food industry by signing a bill that could increase fast food workers’ minimum wages to as much as $22 an hour, and he has made national news for his aggressive new policies to address the climate crisis.
But as the state’s bustling legislative session comes to an end, the Newsom administration has also taken a more measured approach to California’s powerful agricultural industry — an industry that is at the center of some of the state’s most urgent labor debates and climate initiatives.
Consider two of the buzziest labor bills to cross the governor’s desk this session. Newsom signed one of them, AB 257, to great fanfare on Labor Day. The groundbreaking legislation will create a 10-person Fast Food Council in California, which will have the authority to create statewide standards for wages, hours, and working conditions across the fast food industry. It will include state officials, workers’ delegates, and industry representatives, and will set an industry-wide minimum wage in California, which could rise to $22 an hour — a potentially life-changing raise for hundreds of thousands of fast food workers.
The Fast Food Council could also be a major step towards sectoral bargaining in the United States — a process by which unions negotiate with their employers on an industry-wide basis, rather than negotiating with individual stores or companies within that industry. Restaurant groups and fast food corporations had fiercely opposed the legislation, but Newsom was undeterred.
“I’m proud to sign this legislation on Labor Day,” the governor in a statement issued Monday, “when we pay tribute to the workers who keep our state running as we build a stronger, more inclusive economy for all Californians.”
However, Newsom was less forthcoming about AB 2183, a second labor-related bill that business groups have vigorously opposed. It would give farmworkers more flexibility in union elections, including the option to vote by mail. The United Farm Workers (UFW) has urged Newsom to sign the bill, arguing that it would prevent ag employers from retaliating against workers for organizing. In August, workers and labor organizers marched a grueling 335 miles from Delano, California to Sacramento to raise awareness about the bill.
The agricultural sector has vehemently opposed the legislation, which includes a “card check” provision, a process by which workers sign cards asking a union to represent them, rather than voting to unionize by ballot. Business groups claim the UFW could use “card checks” to coerce workers into joining them, and the California Farm Bureau has also claimed that the union could corrupt a mail-in ballot process as well. UFW representatives have dismissed this argument, noting that California’s statewide mail-in ballot process has not resulted in any known cases of voter fraud.
On Friday, Aug. 26, Gov. Newsom said that he could not support the bill as currently written, and it has since undergone several revisions. President Joe Biden recently waded into California politics and urged him to support the legislation. “In the state with the largest population of farmworkers, the least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union,” he said in a statement on Sunday. “It is long past time that we ensure America’s farmworkers and other essential workers have the same right to join a union as other Americans.”
Meanwhile, the Golden State sweats its way through a third year of historic, climate change-related drought, its legislature failed to pass any laws that would bolster the state’s water supply. And a bill meant to stop farmers from overpumping groundwater died last Wednesday, after Newsom told assembly members that he wouldn’t sign it as written.
The decision was a blow to California water activists, who say the bill would have protected the state’s fragile aquifers by requiring farmers to undergo a more rigorous well permitting process. Despite record drought and new state regulations, California’s agricultural sector has drilled more than 6,750 new wells in the past five years. As a result, farmland is sinking by up to a foot a year in some parts of the Central Valley, California’s most productive agricultural region. The number of wells that have gone dry in the state has also increased by more than 70 percent since 2021.
Agricultural groups opposed the bill, arguing that it would complicate previous state regulations — and that it lumped all farmers together. “Some (basins) are in critical overdraft, some are being managed sustainably already. This bill created a uniform envelope over all of them,” Daniel Merkley, the California Farm Bureau Federation’s water resources director, told CalMatters last week.
While the failure of AB 2201 is something of an ag victory, the bill’s supporters are hopeful that they could pass similar legislation next year. If anything, Newsom may be interested in signing a stronger version of it. According to CalMatters, AB 2201 did not include key regulations that Newsom embraced in a drought-related executive order earlier this year, including a measure that requires farmers to show their wells would not increase subsidence.
A nearly $50 billion industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people, California’s agricultural sector will play a pivotal role in that state’s efforts to mitigate climate change or adapt to it. The industry produces 25 percent of the nation’s food supply, but also emits an estimated 7 percent of the state’s greenhouse gasses, and consumes roughly 80 percent of state water allocated for human use.
As California’s legislative session winds down, Newsom is still sitting on a stack of bills that could significantly shape the agricultural sector. The legislature has also passed bills that would streamline water permitting for marijuana growers, ban the sale of agricultural land to foreign governments, and require the state to set specific greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration targets — some of which would involve boosting carbon storage on agricultural lands. All three bills have arrived at Gov. Newsom’s desk and are awaiting his signature.