The Hollywood Teamsters’ float at L.A. Pride was upholstered with sparkly blue fabric provided by a location manager who has worked on Peacock’s “Bel-Air” and Netflix’s “The Politician.”

The giant bubble letters were layered by a construction coordinator on Freeform’s “Good Trouble.” The horse heads were turned to gold by painters whose resumes include “Jerry Maguire” and “The Big Lebowski.” The rainbow jewels came directly from the set of Lionsgate’s upcoming Michael Jackson biopic.

Roughly one month after the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, the largest union representing Hollywood crew members, entered general contract negotiations with the major studios, a smaller coalition of below-the-line workers is stepping into the spotlight. And dozens of them took to the streets of Hollywood over the weekend to build LGBTQ+ and crew member solidarity ahead of their next round of bargaining.

“As far as you can see, there are people here who support equality, and that’s why we’re here,” said Chris Fuentes, a location manager and president of the Teamsters LGBTQ+ caucus. “In the end, it’s about equality and respect. We have to respect these workers and pay them what they’re worth.”

Teamsters Local 399 is part of the Hollywood Basic Crafts, which is scheduled to begin main contract talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on Monday.

Union members are seeking wage increases, pension and health benefits, higher streaming residuals and protections against artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles for some 7,600 crew members — including animal trainers, casting directors, drivers, location managers, mechanics, cement masons and plumbers — employed on film and TV sets.

In addition to Teamsters Local 399, the union side (known collectively as the Hollywood Basic Crafts) consists of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 40, Laborers International Union of North America Local 724, United Assn. Plumbers Local 78 and the Operating Plasterers and Cement Masons International Assn. Local 755.

The studio side represents Amazon MGM, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros. Discovery and other companies. The AMPTP declined to comment for this story.

In early March, Teamsters Local 399 and the Hollywood Basic Crafts joined forces with IATSE to negotiate updates to their shared pension and health plan jointly for the first time in 36 years. Efforts to reach an agreement on that package are ongoing; pension and health benefits remain a sticking point in IATSE negotiations.

Now, the Hollywood Teamsters and Basic Crafts are back to bargain simultaneously for six contracts covering different groupings of crew members. The current below-the-line agreements are set to expire July 31.

The pressure to secure substantial financial gains is high in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hollywood strikes of 2023 and an ongoing industry contraction — all of which have reduced employment opportunities for entertainment workers in recent years. According to Lindsay Dougherty, principal officer and chief negotiator of Teamsters Local 399, wage increases are a priority for the union even more than in past contract negotiations, “coming off of years of financial distress.”

“When I first got into this business 22 years ago, you could be a location manager, and your significant other could stay home. It was that good of a job,” said Jason McCauley, a location manager whose credits include HBO’s “Westworld” and Warner Bros.’ “Joker: Folie à Deux.” “These days, I can barely pay our bills working 60 hours a week or more.”

Safety and the hazards of working marathon shifts that can last 20-plus hours are also issues the unions are hoping to address, mainly by setting compensation standards that would deter employers from requiring crews to work overtime.

“If there are productions out there that are working our members with excessive hours … they should know that they’re going to have to pay to play,” Dougherty said. “They will not film as many hours if they know it’s going to cost them more money.”

Fears of another Hollywood walkout have softened somewhat as IATSE negotiations have transpired largely without incident. Dougherty joked that in a perfect world, the AMPTP would agree to all of the Hollywood Teamsters and Basic Crafts proposals, yielding a resolution Monday.

But the unions are prepared to bargain down to the wire if necessary.

“We went on strike one time in our history with these companies, and that was in 1988, so it’s possible to … bargain without having to strike,” Dougherty said. “It’s gonna take as long as it needs to.”

Second only to the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on when presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, the biggest case of the court’s recently completed session involved the age-old conflict between judges and government regulators.

The case concerned a 40-year-old precedent known as “Chevron deference.” That doctrine held that when a federal law is ambiguous, the courts must defer to the interpretations offered by the agencies the law covers — as long as those interpretations are “reasonable.” On Monday, the court discarded Chevron deference.

This may sound like an abstruse legalistic squabble, but it has massive implications for Americans in all walks of life. It could subject agency decisions on scientifically based issues such as clean air and water regulations and healthcare standards to endless nitpicking by a federal judiciary that already has displayed an alarming willingness to dismiss scientific expertise out of hand, in favor of partisan or religious ideologies.

The ruling amounts to an apogee of arrogance on the part of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. But it’s not a new development.

“The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,” Kagan wrote; “its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education…. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden.”

Chevron deference originated in 1984, when environmentalists were fighting an effort by the EPA under Ronald Reagan to loosen clean air rules at the behest of industrial polluters. As it happens, the environmentalists lost that battle, but over time they won the war against deregulation.

Conservatives have had it in for Chevron deference for a long time; given their current majority on the court, the doctrine’s death has been a foregone conclusion, awaiting only the appearance of a suitable case to use as a bludgeon. Indeed, the majority was so impatient to kill the doctrine that the court’s six conservatives chose to do so by using a case that actually is moot.

That case arose from a lawsuit brought by the herring industry, which objected to a government policy requiring herring boats to pay for government observers placed on board to make sure the boats were complying with their harvesting permits.

The rule was imposed under the Trump administration, but it was canceled in April 2023 by Biden, who repaid the money that had been taken from the boat owners — so there’s nothing left in it for the court to rule on.

Interestingly, Chevron deference was not always seen as a bulwark protecting progressive regulatory policies from right-wing judges, as it’s viewed today. At its inception, it was seen in exactly the opposite way — as giving conservative policies protection from progressive-minded judges.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which brought the original case in an effort to preserve Clean Air Act regulations that were being overturned by the Reagan administration, counted the 1984 ruling as a severe loss.

At issue then was the definition of a pollution “source.” Past practice defined it as a single building or smokestack; the administration wanted to redefine “source” broadly, as referring to an entire pollution-emitting plant. This wasn’t a trivial difference. The NRDC’s interpretation was more stringent than the government’s, for the latter allowed a polluter essentially to hide law-breaking emissions within an otherwise non-polluting plant.

The original Chevron ruling was 6 to 0 (three justices didn’t participate — two because of illness and the third, Sandra Day O’Connor, recused herself because of a conflict of interest). The ruling stated that when a federal law was ambiguous or silent on a particular issue, judges were bound to defer to the interpretation offered by the agency covered by the law, as long as its interpretation was “reasonable.”

One other thing: The functionary pushing to give industry more freedom to pollute was Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the late Anne Gorsuch. Name sound familiar? Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who is her son, lined up with the anti-Chevron majority. Curiously, he didn’t mention his family history in his separate concurrence — or perhaps not so curiously, because his mother was on the winning side of the decision that he has now voted to overturn.

In any event, Gorsuch’s words about the case in which his mother triumphed were telling. “Today,” he concluded gleefully, “the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.”

The truth is that the Chevron ruling of 1984 and Monday’s ruling both served a goal shared by Anne Gorsuch and her offspring: providing federal judges all the leeway they might need to see things the way Big Business prefers.

Forty years ago, when the Reagan White House was pulling down a regulatory edifice that industry resented, the Supreme Court was happy to have judges defer to the agencies participating in that project, including Anne Gorsuch’s EPA. Today, when the deregulatory process is opposed by government agencies that take seriously their duty to make life better for the average consumer, the court tells judges that they’re free to ignore agency findings.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called Chevron “misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

This is self-refuting. Chevron deference isn’t about “resolving ambiguities” in the law. It’s about recognizing that sometimes those ambiguities are deliberate — put in place by lawmakers who know they can’t possibly write a law that covers all situations from now to the end of time. The “ambiguities” are there because Congress wishes that the agencies it has charged with fulfilling its goals use their technical and scientific knowledge to meet the challenges of a changing world.

Things have indeed changed. Generally speaking, wrote legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein in 2019, environmentalists and other progressives saw the original decision as “a capitulation to the (insufficiently zealous) administrative state, which was often captured by powerful private interests.” Today, the right wing portrays the “administrative state” as a shadowy cabal bent on thwarting the will of the people (that is, conservative policies). “The right and the left have switched sides,” Sunstein observed.

Chevron deference was very much a product of its time, Sunstein noted. In the 1960s and 1970s, “federal courts had been aggressively reviewing agency action (and inaction), often with the goal of producing greater regulation.” Typically, “the judges were on the political left.”

They had grown up professionally in the atmosphere created by the Warren court, which fostered the notion that the courts existed to protect and extend individual rights. “To their defenders,” Sunstein wrote, “the lower federal courts assumed a kind of heroic stance.”

This was the era that brought us an unprecedented, judicially driven expansion of individual rights, through such decisions as Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), which established the right of married couples to use contraceptives without state interference; Loving vs. Virginia (1967), which invalidated laws against interracial marriage; and of course Roe vs. Wade (1973), which established the nationwide right to abortion.

The current conservative majority has already begun to roll back this historic approach to individual rights, most notably through the Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned Roe vs. Wade.

Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested that Griswold should follow Roe vs. Wade into the juridical dumpster, along with Lawrence vs. Hodges (2003), which invalidated state laws against sodomy among consenting adults, and Obergefell vs. Hodges (2005), which legalized same-sex marriages nationwide. The court, Thomas remarked in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, “should reconsider” those rulings.

Those cases were decided on different grounds from Chevron, but liberal judges saw the expansion of individual rights as part of the same principle that prompted them to aggressively examine agency actions that tended to narrow those rights.

As it happens, the Chevron decision didn’t generate much interest when it was handed down. The six justices who ruled unanimously in the EPA’s favor apparently thought they were weighing in on a narrow technicality. One legal scholar has called Chevron an “accidental landmark”; its significance only emerged from subsequent federal rulings and, perhaps most important, its embrace by Justice Antonin Scalia, who joined the Supreme Court two years later.

Scalia wrote in a 1989 law review article that Chevron deference made sense in the modern world: If there was an ambiguity in the law, the reason was either that Congress was sloppy (in which case the courts had the duty to say what a law meant) or that the lawmakers deliberately delegated to agencies the task of responding to changing realities by using their “advancing knowledge.” Over time, to be sure, he grew discontented with the doctrine (as Roberts and Gorsuch took pains to point out.)

Monday’s decision puts the lie to conservatives’ oft-expressed disdain for policies made by “unelected” bureaucrats. “Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to the public for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability,” Kagan wrote. Calling the decision “a bald assertion of judicial authority, she added: “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”

That’s not to say that the majority won’t share the power they have now arrogated for themselves. They will walk hand-in-hand with the Big Business leaders and conservative ideologues who put them on the court, and the rest of us will just have to live with the consequences.

Fast-food workers have long complained of unstable schedules that make it difficult to plan their finances, child care, medical appointments and other obligations.

Now, a proposal by Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez aims to give these workers more stability and consistency in scheduling, as well as access to paid time off.

The proposal, which Soto-Martinez plans to introduce Tuesday, aims to expand the reach of the city’s Fair Work Week law — which requires that employers give retail workers their schedules in advance — to include some 2,500 large chain fast-food restaurants that employ roughly 50,000 workers.

It also proposes an annual mandatory six-hour paid training period to help educate workers on their rights. And it would require that fast-food workers accrue an hour of paid time off for every 30 hours they work — on top of paid sick leave to which they are already entitled.

The push is the latest move by lawmakers across the state to improve working conditions for low-wage fast food workers who’ve struggled to make ends meet in expensive cities such as Los Angeles. Earlier this year, California adopted a minimum wage for fast-food workers of $20 an hour.

But the proposed city ordinance is likely to be met with stiff opposition from industry groups.

Several business and trade groups have said that this type of predictable scheduling policy complicates the process of scheduling staff.

The Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce had said that a similar L.A. County measure would hamper businesses already struggling to compete against e-commerce companies. And the California Grocers Assn. said it would make last-minute staffing changes “extremely challenging.”

Soto-Martinez said the idea behind the L.A. measure is to give fast-food workers the ability to attend a wedding, a quinceañera, a doctor’s appointment, or their child’s graduation — entitlements of many white-collar workers.

“Fast-food workers, their needs and their desires, are often irgnored. We need to do our part as a city,” he said.

The proposal is backed by California’s statewide union of fast-food workers, formed earlier this year. The California Fast Food Workers Union, created with help from the Service Employees International Union, is the culmination of years of employee walkouts over issues including the handling of sexual harassment claims, wage theft, safety and pay, such as the Fight for $15 movement to increase the minimum wage, which was organized by the SEIU in 2012.

“The 50,000 of us who stand to gain important protections on the job through this ordinance are not just fast-food workers, we are parents, grandparents, students and providers,” Anneisha Williams said in a statement by the union.

Williams, who works at a Los Angeles Jack in the Box, is a member of the state’s newly formed Fast Food Council.

Julieta Garcia, 36, who has worked at a Pizza Hut in Historic Filipinotown for 1½ years, said her hours are very irregular, averaging about 20 hours a week.

“Mentally, it has hurt me — the stress of figuring out how I will cover all of my bills,” she said.

Garcia said it has also made it difficult to show up for her family. Paid time off would help her be able to attend her son’s school plays, or visit a terminally ill family member, she said.

L.A. is among several cities nationwide, including Seattle, New York and Chicago, that have adopted scheduling laws.

L.A.’s Fair Work Week law, approved by Los Angeles City Council in 2022, already requires large retail and grocery chains such as Target, Ralphs and Home Depot to give employees their work schedule at least two weeks in advance. It further requires businesses to give workers at least 10 hours’ rest between shifts, or provide extra pay for that work.

Researchers at the Shift Project, an initiative from Harvard University and UC San Francisco that is focused on service-sector workers, have found that upredictable work schedules lead to unstable incomes as well as poor sleep and psychological distress.