Sandro Flores, 26, has a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, which he hoped would lead to a well paying career doing biological testing in a lab. But to reach that goal, he requires additional education beyond his degree. That would mean forgoing full-time work while undertaking months of additional training.
As he figures out what his next steps in life will be, he earns his living as a gig worker, driving for food delivery apps.
It is a job that demands street smarts more than studies, and requires him to sleep in his car and work days that last as long as 16 hours to make enough to get by. On a windy day in April, he steered his white Ford Fusion through West Los Angeles traffic, juggling food orders and being tailgated by aggressive drivers.
Flores’ time is governed by a constant calculus. The size of a customer’s tip, the distance between the restaurant and office workers requesting the deliveries, L.A. traffic, and his need for rest and food: These variables determine how much he can earn and what his movements will be throughout the city. He pulled over to an empty parking lot to toggle between DoorDash and UberEats, evaluating whether any given order displayed on the meal delivery apps penciled out.
To make it through college, Flores has always worked hard jobs. While a high school and college student, he was a fast-food worker, dealing with broken air conditioners in kitchens that were so hot that “you couldn’t even breathe.” He had set his sights on becoming a clinical lab scientist, a position with an annual salary in the triple digits, according to Indeed.
Flores has lived on a treadmill, working paycheck to paycheck and unable to move ahead. His ambitions are weighed down by bills and the responsibility he feels for his family, which was also reliant on low wage jobs and vulnerable to sudden setbacks like the ones he and his mother experienced over the last year and a half.
Flores’ challenges are like those faced by many young people unable to find work that would reward their education with decent pay. Those challenges can be compounded when their families lack the means to help them — or are dependent on them for support. In 2021, as he was finishing his college course work, Flores began working alongside his mother at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant in Downey, California. Then Flores became the alleged target of sexual harassment. When he spoke up about the harassment, he suffered alleged retaliation and his hours were cut from full time to as few as 12 hours a week. Last summer, his mother had a fall that would make it impossible for her to work.
To support himself and his mother, he turned to the food delivery apps. Now he was earning more money than he did as a fast-food worker, between $600 and $1,000 per week. But at no small cost. He was showering at the gym and living in his car for a week at a time so as to save money on his commute between his home in Watts and West Los Angeles, where his affluent customers lived. Once he woke in West Hollywood to a man glaring at him through his windshield holding what he took to be a spear. “I learned not to sleep without the cover for my windshield,” he said.
California may have an active labor movement and labor-friendly political leaders in control of its Legislature and many city councils. But almost one in three California workers — 4.3 million people — are employed in a job that pays less than $18.02 per hour, according to a UC Berkeley Labor Center data explorer.
This is the California paradox. State lawmakers can mandate that employers pay higher minimum wages, but they cannot on their own transform a labor market that has an overabundance of low wage jobs. Add to the equation the state’s notoriously high housing costs, and California has one of the highest functional poverty rates in the country. The economy’s failure to provide safe and stable jobs harms low wage workers. It also limits the opportunities for the children of those workers, many of whom are immigrants. “When [the children of immigrants] grow up and go to college and create opportunities for themselves, they don’t just leave. They put their families first,” said Victor Narro, a project director for the UCLA Labor Center and an expert on immigrant workers. “They often cannot go to graduate school or pursue other professional education at the post-college level because they are looking after their family.”
Two out of five women in nonmanagerial positions working in the fast-food industry say they experienced sexual harassment, according to a 2016 survey.
Last year, Flores and his mother, Hortencia Avonce, who had been the household’s primary breadwinner, were just two of California’s 384,000 fast-food workers. It’s a sector characterized by sky high turnover, wage theft and an average annual wage in California of $34,530, just a few thousand dollars over the federal poverty level for a family of four. These jobs are disproportionately occupied by women, immigrants and people of color.
Fast-food jobs are not just low paid. They come with other hazards. Two out of five women in nonmanagerial positions working in the fast-food industry say they experienced sexual harassment, according to a 2016 survey. Flores’ trouble began to mount in late 2021 when a co-worker started to call him names like “chucha” (cunt) and “perra” (dog), according to a complaint filed with the California Civil Rights Department in August 2022.
Flores has long black curly hair that he wears loose or in a bun. He is openly gay and has dealt with bullies before. He tried to laugh it off at first, but it took a toll. “It’s like holding a glass of water. You hold it for one minute, and it might not be as heavy. But if you’re holding on for a while, you’re going to feel the weight,” said Flores.
Last spring, a co-worker threw a hamburger at his head while he was in the break room. When management finally acted, they sent Flores to work at two nearby restaurants owned by the same company. His alleged harasser, meanwhile, remained at the Downey restaurant, according to his complaint.
Then their luck got worse. In June, Avonce, who is 49, was fetching beef patties from a walk-in freezer cluttered with boxes when she fell about five feet, landing hard in a seated position. As soon as she righted herself, her co-worker urged her back to the front of the restaurant where a line of customers had formed. She began taking orders. Pain coursed through her back, and her leg began to cramp. By the time she picked up her youngest son at school, she was unable to get out of the car.
She took a week off to rest. Her doctor recommended that she work with restrictions when she returned to the restaurant. That meant shorter shifts and less money. When she finally quit working at the restaurant this past winter, she was making $15.50 an hour. Avonce hasn’t filed for disability insurance because she is not sure how to do it.
“You don’t have time to be sick. Oftentimes you don’t have time to be hungry. You have to work.”~ Hortencia Avonce
“There was a time that we ran out of money. We didn’t even have enough money to pay for food,” said Avonce. She applied to CalFresh, the state’s food assistance program that is available for people who earn less than 200% of the federal poverty line, or $4,626 per month for a family of four.
The owner of the Carl’s Jr. restaurant, Southern California-based Akash Management LLC, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A representative for Carl’s Jr. said in an email, “The Carl’s Jr. brand does not tolerate discrimination of any kind, and we expect our franchisees to have a culture of respect for and among their guests, team members, vendors, and visitors.”
Flores and Avonce laugh easily together, including about this period of hardship when the family subsisted on beans. “We found ways to make a different recipe every single day,” Flores remembered. Youthful at 49, Avonce has shoulder length, red tinted hair and a compact frame. Drinking coffee with her son at the Tierra Mia cafe in Huntington Park, she wore tie dye purple leggings and her hair swept back. “I love beans,” she chuckled.
But driving through West L.A. in April, Flores seemed to have the world on his shoulders. There were his bills, the $750 he owed on his credit card, the $250 he owed his brother, the $694 he needed to set aside for his family’s overdue utility bill. His monthly car payment totaled about $570. He had concerns about his mother’s health and the outcome of his harassment case against his former employer, the Carl’s Jr restaurant.
Flores’ financial insecurity has deeper roots than the twin crises he and his mother faced at Carl’s Jr. When Avonce fell in the walk-in freezer, she had worked for over a decade in fast food and other low wage jobs in Los Angeles. She first arrived in Los Angeles in 1998, fleeing violence in Michoacan, Mexico, a region that had become home to drug cartels.
Before she left for the U.S., Avonce was also told stories of upward mobility by her cousins and neighbors who had lived there. “They sold us this American Dream that there were tons of jobs and loads of money, but it wasn’t the reality,” she said.
What she found was a country where the private sector unionization rate had declined to 9% from a high of 35.7% in 1953. As of 2019 it stood at 6.2%.
“Honestly, I feel like my generation was sold this idea that if you went to college and you finished college, you were set.”~ Sandro Flores
Her first jobs were for temp agencies, including one that sent her to a factory to sew alarms onto clothing for a big-name brand clothing label. She labored in the freezer of a food processing plant. The temp agencies were predatory, but the factories that hired her directly were no better, she said. “They make you do the work of three people once you’re hired on,” she said. Once a preschool teacher in Mexico, she worked for El Pollo Loco, McDonald’s and eventually at Carl’s Jr.
While working, she has always had side gigs in the region’s informal economy, which was estimated at 679,000 people in a 2005 Economic Roundtable study. Like Avonce, they sell tamales. They sell shoes to co-workers, and hawk clothes at swap meets — activities that do not show up in formal data sources. “You don’t have time to be sick. Oftentimes you don’t have time to be hungry. You have to work,” Avonce said through a translator.
Still, Avonce has managed to secure a piece of the dream. In 2011, she purchased a $150,000 house in Watts and has made the garden an oasis of succulents, medicinal plants and flowers. The 867-square-foot home is now worth more than $500,000 on Redfin. But the equity that she has built up over the years is inaccessible to her because she doesn’t have a job or the credit score that would allow her to access it, she said. When it comes to her bills, she is living from month to month.
In April, the family owed more than $4,000 to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a bill that was Flores’ responsibility. Because Avonce’s household includes multiple wage earners — her brother works two jobs, and one of her sons receives disability payments from the military — financial shocks are easier to bear than for some other low wage workers. Without that support, “It would be very difficult,” said Avonce. “We help each other.”
When Flores experienced the alleged harassment at Carl’s Jr., he joined the Fight for $15, a campaign led by the Service Employees International Union whose initial demand when it launched in 2012 was for a $15 per hour minimum wage. Flores said he was glad that something good came out of his ordeal. “God put me in the right place so that I can speak up,” he said. The campaign has led to minimum wage increases in Democratic-controlled states and cities across the country. But fast-food workers’ demand for a union has remained elusive.
Flores has shared his story with legislators and workers, and his activism appeared to pay off. Last Labor Day, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed state legislation to implement industrywide bargaining by creating a Fast Food Council, similar to practices in Europe. (In sectoral bargaining, workers and employers negotiate wages and working conditions for an entire industry as opposed to for a particular enterprise.) However, an industry-backed referendum seeking to overturn Assembly Bill 257 qualified in January for the November 2024 ballot and halted its implementation. “We want to reform the fast food industry so it can work for all of us,” Flores explained.
Flores was less clear about his own future. Given his circumstances and the $28,000 in college debt he incurred while at Cal State, Los Angeles, he questioned the value of a college education despite studies suggesting the benefit of the credential. “Honestly, I feel like my generation was sold this idea that if you went to college and you finished college, you were set,” he said. He wouldn’t urge his children to go to college. He did, however, think that his children “probably will wind up in the fast-food industry.” In fact, his younger brother, who is 18, was about to start his first fast-food job, at McDonald’s.
His mother was frustrated with the disability stemming from her fall. She had always been the main breadwinner for the family, and not being able to work or to paint for long stretches of time upset her. Avonce is a self-taught artist. Her garden is filled with pot-shaped sculptures that she has crafted from discarded towels and brightly painted rocks. Her art is also therapy. When she cannot sleep at night, which is often, she gets up and paints. Some of her art offers social commentary. In one painting, spectral arms haunt a huddled group of Jack in the Box workers.
After speaking for two hours in her garden in April, she had sat too long. She stood up and put her hand on her back. “Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve always lifted myself up and risen because I’ve had the capacity to do that. But now that I’m injured, what am I supposed to do?” she said.
By May, Flores’ outlook on his own future had shifted. Flores and his mother had both settled their harassment case with the owner of the Carl’s Jr. restaurant. He said he could not disclose the settlement’s terms. He was imagining new possibilities for himself: more education, “a job that actually serves my career,” Flores said. That would bring some solace to Avonce, as she works to recuperate from her fall. “Their accomplishments are my accomplishments,” she said of her children.
