Retail employees in Los Angeles working irregular schedules, called in for shifts with just a few hours’ notice, got some relief years ago in the form of a city law requiring large retailers to give them notice of their schedules at least two weeks in advance.

Now, that 2024 law could be expanded to encompass the city’s fast-food industry, whose precarious workforce — largely women from immigrant communities — has long raised concerns over unstable schedules that they say make it difficult to plan their finances, child care, medical appointments and other obligations.

The L.A. City Council’s economic development and jobs committee late last month approved the ordinance, which also would establish a mandatory six-hour paid training to educate workers on minimum wage laws and other labor protections. It goes to the full council for a vote on Tuesday.

The proposal is backed by a statewide union of fast-food workers — established in 2024 — that is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, which for years has helped organize fast-food employee walkouts over wage theft, safety and pay.

The California Fast Food Workers Union‘s organizing director, Maria Maldonado, said workers often are unaware of their rights regarding heat exposure and other risky conditions common in kitchens. The training, she said, would show them they have recourse and city support for reporting employers when conditions are unsafe.

“If you know there is support to enforce the law, we are going to see a difference in the industry,” Maldonado said.

City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez first introduced the ordinance in 2024.

Although worker-friendly proposals usually are ultimately backed by the L.A. City Council, the process often is lengthy, with business interests lobbying against such measures.

The California Restaurant Assn. wrote in a letter to the council that the ordinance would greatly increase costs in a state that already is expensive to operate in and that it unfairly singles out an industry that has long served as a successful pathway to business ownership for minority entrepreneurs.

In the letter, business groups took issue with third parties administering worker training, arguing that labor groups could use them to prime the workforce for union campaigns.

The ordinance would “not only duplicate existing law but also force neighborhood restaurants to pay thousands of dollars so groups with ulterior motives can hold team members as a captive audience,” the letter said.

The group also argued that training would create third-party access to workers’ data even as many immigrant workers are fearful of heightened immigration enforcement, noting that the training might “require employers to disclose sensitive information to outside entities, creating serious privacy risks.”

A report commissioned by McDonald’s, compiled by the firm Beacon Economics and Pepperdine University, surveyed some 1,200 workers in L.A. County and found that a majority, about 70.6%, opposed the proposed paid training, while 29.4% said they would want such training, the survey said.

California’s fast-food industry employs more than 750,000 people and is a growing sector, according to state data. The state fast-food union has argued that local and state protections are crucial.

“Medicare for All,” that fundamental reform of America’s fractured healthcare system long championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives, had its heyday about 10 years ago.

That’s when Sanders and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) lined up 140 co-sponsors for a bill that, alas, died in committee, just like the version that Conyers first introduced in 2003. Versions of the same bill have been introduced in every Congress since then, right up through 2025. None got out of committee.

But what seemed over that time span to look like a quixotic effort has lately gained a new foothold in Democratic politics. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, has placed Medicare for All at the forefront of his campaign.

Discontent with our current healthcare system, which costs twice as much per capita as some other developed countries for materially worse outcomes, is not only a Democratic issue. The hard-right former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) declared last year on X that she’d like to “see Health Insurance CEOs … getting chewed out on live television.”

Other Republicans, including Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), have picked up the cudgel against health insurers.

The cost of healthcare under our current system has become a factor in the “affordability” debate, especially since congressional Republicans allowed enhanced premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans to expire at the end of last year.

Like most previous iterations of Medicare for All, Sanders’ latest version, which he introduced in April 2025, would effectively outlaw private health insurance for most treatments. The replacement would be a single-payer system in which all U.S. residents would be enrolled. The system would cover hospital and physician services, most prescription drugs, mental health and substance abuse treatment, dental and vision services, long-term care and gender affirming and reproductive care such as contraception and abortions.

There would be no deductibles, co-pays or other forms of cost-sharing, except for some brand-name prescription drugs if generics are available. (Even so, patients’ annual prescription charges would be capped initially at an inflation-adjusted $200 per person.) Private insurers could offer “supplemental” benefits, but couldn’t duplicate coverage provided by the government. States could provide for additional coverage, but would have to pay for it out of their own budgets.

The term “Medicare for All” exploits the popularity of Medicare itself, which kicks in for most people at age 65. In its earliest versions, the idea was simply to allow younger people to enroll in Medicare. But that wouldn’t work very well, because of gaps in that program — it doesn’t cover dental or vision care and has no out-of-pocket cap. Today’s version would expand and improve on Medicare.

What’s the downside, then?

The rap on Medicare for All hasn’t evolved much since 2003. Its principal critics are the health insurance industry (no surprise there) and the same conservative Republicans who have tried repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act. As before, they have mustered lies, misrepresentations and fear-mongering to fight the measure. So let’s examine their arguments.

Health insurers portray themselves as providers of “safe, timely, evidence-based, affordable, and efficient care.” Yet “Americans are increasingly fed up with private health insurers,” observes reform advocate Wendell Potter, citing “complaints about denied care, prior authorization, rising premiums and exorbitant out-of-pocket requirements.” (Potter knows the field — until he experienced his “road-to-Damascus” conversion in 2008, he was the chief PR flack for the health insurance company Cigna.)

The insurers say they bring simplicity and transparency to healthcare, while the truth is the opposite. Trying to find an explanation for why a claim was denied is a fruitless task. Simplicity? To offer a personal example, when a member of my extended family had to schedule a minor diagnostic procedure, they were informed that they’d be receiving four separate bills from providers, including from a surgeon, pathologist, hospital and laboratory, and it was up to them to determine which if any of these providers was within their insurer’s network.

As I wrote in 2019, the health insurance industry hasn’t achieved much beyond establishing itself as a profiteering force within the U.S. healthcare system, driving up costs while failing to improve care. The Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, was a crucial step toward reining the insurers in, but partisan opposition killed a proposed “public option” that would have competed with the industry.

The deadliest weapon wielded against Medicare for All is its supposed high cost. The most commonly cited figure is $32.6 trillion over 10 years. This widely debunked figure comes from a 2018 paper by the conservative analyst Charles Blahous of the Koch-associated Mercatus Center of George Mason University.

As I and other critics pointed out at the time, Blahous’ figure applied only to the increase in federal healthcare expenditures. Fair enough: Placing almost all healthcare expenditures in federal hands would certainly increase federal spending.

The flaw in his argument, however, was that it didn’t accommodate the other side of the ledger, which is the savings experienced by individuals, families and businesses by transferring their spending to the government — not to mention the savings that hospitals and physicians would enjoy by no longer having to employ armies of bureaucrats to steer claims to the right insurance companies, or the time-suck facing patients trying to secure coverage.

Those savings, Blahous acknowledged in his paper, would reduce total U.S. healthcare spending — that is, private and government — by $2 trillion over 10 years. In other words, Blahous inadvertently had made the case for Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal. Blahous’ defense was that the reduction was “only” 4% — as though people would consider a $2-trillion reduction in healthcare spending a negligible figure.

One might have expected that the scrutiny Blahous’ math received would put his claim to rest. But it’s still a major component of the anti-Medicare for All argument. It appears, for instance, on the website of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a lobbying organization comprising health insurers and pro-business groups such as local chambers of commerce.

Another common argument is that single-payer systems are inherently inefficient, as evidenced ostensibly by long waits for treatment suffered by patients in single-payer countries such as Canada. Much of that argument is exaggerated, however.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board took this bit between its teeth recently with an essay titled “Dying for Medicare for All.” The item asserted that some Medicare and Medicaid cancer patients wait longer for treatment than those with private insurance. Its gist was an attack on single-payer systems such as Medicare and Medicaid.

The piece was based on a recent study from UCLA that found that waiting times for surgery for nonmetastatic breast, colon, lung, pancreatic, gastric and esophageal cancer have lengthened across the board over the last 10 years or so.

The study, however, didn’t attribute the lengthening delays to flaws in the single-payer system, but rather to the increasing complexity of cancer care and changes in hospital practices. It did find that privately insured patients experienced the shortest delays, but those for Medicare patients were only minimally different from the privately insured.

There are no real grounds to doubt that a single-payer system such as Medicare for All would be cheaper and more effective than the hodgepodge we have now. That’s not to say that the reform would be easy: Sanders’ bill anticipates a four-year transition.

There are other concerns, including who would make the decisions about which treatments are suitable for government coverage. Insulating those judgments from healthcare ideologues like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose anti-vaccine crusade and anti-scientific policies have done immeasurable damage to public health, would be essential.

But one of the pillars of the anti-Medicare for All position, that it’s politically impossible because Americans like their private health insurance so much they’d oppose efforts to replace it, has been crumbling with the passage of time. Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democrat in the White House might find the path easier than it has been for decades. Like El-Sayed, the Democrats should embrace the cause.

California’s transition to electric vehicles is still underway, with more chargers for cars and trucks, more models to choose from and more ambitious sales targets. But it is increasingly shaped by what’s happening on the other side of the country, in Washington, where the federal government is working to slow the transition to EVs and promote a fossil fuel future for America.

The pace of this transition matters for the state’s climate goals, including reaching carbon neutrality by 2045 and getting more gas-powered cars off the road. It’s impossible to address climate change without these since transportation accounts for about half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other sector.

This story is part of a series of occasional articles on the state of the energy transition in California amid opposition from the Trump administration.

In recent months, President Trump has taken dozens of steps to erode California’s ability to get there. They include eliminating the federal tax credit for people who purchase EVs and repealing the basic finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous, which forms the legal basis for regulating vehicle emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Last year, the Trump administration revoked California’s long-held authority to set stricter vehicle emission standards than the federal government — an authority that has been granted to the state since the 1960s. The White House also overturned California’s electric vehicle sales target, which would have required automakers to sell an increasing percentage of zero-emission vehicles over the next decade.

The president has said the state’s rules will drive up costs and limit consumer choice.

The cumulative result is a slower shift to EVs, by several measures.

Electric vehicle sales

The headquarters of automaker Rivian in Irvine. Unlike Tesla, which moved its headquarters to Texas, Rivian remains committed to California.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

National sales dropped sharply after Trump ended the $7,500 federal rebate in September and have not yet fully recovered.

Some automakers also altered their plans under federal pressure. Ford said it will kill several EV models and pivot toward hybrids, while Honda canceled the rollout of its anticipated 0 Series EVs. Volkswagen ended production of its ID.4 electric SUV in the U.S., citing market challenges, and said it will instead ramp up production of the Atlas, a large gasoline-powered SUV.

“What the Trump administration did is put things on its head,” said Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis. The actions didn’t just adjust the nation’s EV agenda, he said — “they did a U-turn.”

But Californians have held their ground. In the second quarter of this year, about 19% of new car sales in the state were zero-emission vehicles. That’s almost three times higher than the national market, although less than the same quarter in 2025, which was also down from 2024, according to data from the California Energy Commission.

Cumulatively, zero-emission vehicles now make up roughly 1 in 12 cars and pickups on California roads, and nearly 1 in 6 new cars sold in the state is fully electric.

The state is also seeing lots more people buying used EVs, and lawmakers have approved millions in state incentives to replace lost federal rebates.

Still, the threat to California’s ambition is real, and the state is now defending its 2035 ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in court. If it fails, California will have to find new ways to eliminate emissions from other sectors, according to Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board. The agency expects 165 tons per day of added nitrogen oxide emissions as a result of the Trump administration’s rollbacks.

A view of a car plugged in at an EV charging station in downtown Los Angeles on Aug. 13.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Greenhouse gas emissions in California have fallen about 21% since 2000, and Trump’s actions are undoubtedly challenging that progress, Buckley said.

“Federal interference threatens that momentum and the state’s ability to meet federal air quality standards, putting public health at risk for millions of Californians — especially those in the most polluted communities,” Buckley said.

A growing network of chargers

An EV charging station in the Arts District of Los Angeles on Aug. 13.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

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The availability of charging stations also plays a huge role in how fast people buy electric vehicles, and California now boasts more EV chargers than gasoline nozzles, according to the Energy Commission. The state has more than 216,000 publicly available EV chargers, meaning they’re not in an employee garage that requires a badge or in a gated apartment complex.

But last year, the Trump administration abruptly froze new funding for one of the key sources of help for new public chargers — the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program — while it rewrote the rules. California and other states sued to challenge the freeze, and a federal judge ruled the administration had acted unlawfully.

California’s expansion of chargers continued anyway. Of the 806 new public fast-charging stations added nationwide in the second quarter of this year, roughly 1 in 7 were in California — by far the most of any state, according to a report from Paren, an EV charging data and analytics platform.

California is also a leader in utilization, with fast chargers in use a healthy 23.1% of the time, second only to Washington, D.C., and Hawaii, according to Paren. And “California pairs a top-tier rate with by far the largest footprint” of fast-charging ports, about 17,400, the report says.

A few years ago, people might have seen one or two chargers in front of a grocery store sitting unused. Now, it’s not uncommon for sites with 28 chargers to be busy all day, said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president of policy and external affairs at EVgo, an El Segundo-based company that operates one of the largest public fast-charging networks in the U.S.

The rising demand for fast public charging, in particular, has been propelled by EV drivers who don’t have charging at their apartment or home, and the growing market for used EVs, she said.

There has also been a surge in electric ride-hailing cars, with drivers of Uber, Lyft and others now representing about a quarter of EVgo users nationally, Rafalson said. In July, California’s Public Utilities Commission approved new incentives of up to $20,300 for ride-hailing app drivers to buy or lease new zero-emission vehicles, and often now, ride hailers can choose to be picked up by an EV on the apps.

“What really is interesting about California is just how intentional they’ve been, with every single state agency setting its own goals and swim lanes for how they’re going to work together to enable consumer choice for electric vehicles,” Rafalson said.

Building EVs in California

Tesla famously moved its headquarters from California to Texas. But EV automaker Rivian, which is headquartered in Irvine, remains committed to the state. It recently announced the R2, a midsize electric SUV, to a long waiting list. Its large luxury SUV, the R1S, ranks as the second most popular large luxury SUV in California — EV or gas — after only the Lexus TX, according to the company.

The company recently raised its delivery outlook for the year from as low as 62,000 vehicles to as many as 70,000 due to demand, and said Amazon now has 40,000 Rivian electric delivery vans.

But Trump’s actions are having a ripple effect, said Brian Gase, Rivian’s vice president of engineering quality, during a recent tour of the Irvine facility, where a buzzing hive of workers built clay prototypes, experimented with sustainable interior materials and tested battery components in subzero chambers.

On one hand, soaring gasoline prices this year have pushed more consumers to consider EVs, Gase said. (Trump’s ongoing war with Iran and the ensuing months-long shipping disruption in the Strait of Hormuz drove oil prices to their highest levels in several years, with Brent crude briefly surging over $126 a barrel in April.)

But the swinging pendulum of policy changes is also creating instability and uncertainty for automakers who typically plan releases years in advance, and for parts of the supply chain, such as aluminum and battery materials, that are subject to changing tariffs, Gase said.

“Businesses like consistency,” he said. “You see this in Scandinavian countries, you see it in China where they mandated EVs and they put money behind it and the industry surged.”

At Rivian’s Irvine facility, workers build clay prototypes, experiment with sustainable interior materials and test battery components in subzero chambers.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

It makes sense to be headquartered in California, both because of its history of car culture and its “positive vision of the future,” said Abigail Ramsden, Rivian’s senior manager of state policy for Western states.

“California’s air quality challenges are traceable to the transportation industry, so electrifying transportation is one of the most pragmatic, real-time and focused steps that California — or any other state that’s suffering from air quality issues — can take to try to transform quality of life for its citizens,” she said.

But Tal, of UC Davis, said he worries the state is not on track to meet its targets, in large part due to the White House’s unprecedented actions.

For years, he has taught his students that market demand and technology are the two biggest sources of uncertainty for the EV industry, followed by government policy.

“Now,” he said, “my books are outdated.”