If you were running a business today — tough enough as that is in this time of economic turmoil, relatively high inflation, rising wages, hard-to-find workers, regulations old and new, supply-chain problems, not to mention the normal entrepreneurial matter of attracting enough customers to keep the doors open — do you imagine you would welcome the prospect of a statewide government-appointed board of outsiders that got to review your employees’ pay and schedules and force you to change them if its members didn’t like them?

Of course you wouldn’t. You would be appalled that, with all your other worries, such a thing could even be allowed to be considered.

Yet that scenario is precisely what California lawmakers approved and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law this year.

“Assembly Bill 257 was set to take effect Jan. 1, creating a 10-person, state-run council to negotiate wages, hours and working conditions” for many of California’s 550,000 fast-food restaurant workers, as our staff writer Kevin Smith has reported.

That the bill is called the FAST Recovery Act — recovery for whom? — would be like being kicked when you’re already down.

There are already plenty of protections for workers in this state, including in the food industry. The minimum wage is rising more quickly here than in other parts of the nation. Workplace regulations on health and safety, while sometimes a bit over-the-top, already provide for the well-being of employees. It is true that unscrupulous business owners — who, to be clear, are breaking the law — sometimes literally steal their employees’ wages by refusing to comply with overtime-pay laws and other guarantees. But the state is already cracking down on wage theft, as it should.

This proposed new bureaucracy affecting large operators such as McDonald’s would create a nightmare scenario for fast-food franchise owners trying to keep prices down for customers, and for customers who would pay for the new expenses as they seek an affordable meal out for themselves and their families.

The cost of the council would not only be driven by the $100 daily stipends its members receive, along with travel and lodging expenses for when it holds meetings. According to the language of AB257, “The council may employ necessary assistants, officers, experts, and other employees as it deems necessary,” all of whom must be state civil service employees.

That’s the kind of government organization that gets really big, and really expensive, really fast.

So it is no wonder that fast-food franchisees, along with the National Restaurant Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have put the act on hold while they have gathered signatures for a November 2024 ballot initiative that would let California voters decide whether the new bureaucracy should begin its oversight of your friendly neighborhood Der Weinerschnitzel.

We can’t say we are looking forward to the barrage of advertising from both sides — the restaurants and the deep-pocketed SEIU California union that backed the bill — during election season two years from now in attempts to sway the voters.

But it was the right course of action for restaurant owners to take. And as of earlier this month, the chamber said more than 1 million voter signatures had been gathered for the referendum, more than enough for the 623,000 needed by the Dec. 4 deadline. The California Secretary of State’s Office is currently verifying the signatures.

The union objects to the campaign, saying the referendum process takes matters out of the hands of a duly elected Legislature. But that’s the way we do things in the Golden State — put issues into the admittedly messy and advertising-heavy fray of direct democracy when need be. Saying that “corporate America” is thus able to buy off such elections is an absurdity in a California where legislators’ campaigns are likewise paid for by “corporate labor” and the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends to influence state elections.

Stifling job growth and hiking food prices is not what Californians are clamoring for just now.