The news for America’s low-wage workers has been pretty bleak these past, oh, 30 or 40 years or so. Their pay has stagnated and their bargaining power has atrophied, even as their corporate overlords have seen their own profits and compensation soar. But there are signs of a brightening underway, and the latest one arrived Tuesday in the form of a possibly consequential finding against one of the most iconic low-wage employers of all, McDonald’s.

The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, Richard Griffin Jr., ruled that he would include McDonald’s as a “joint employer” in the 43 unfair labor practice complaints filed by McDonald’s workers over the past 20 months that Griffin deemed had merit (the complaints mostly involve retaliation against workers who engaged in organizing efforts). In the past, McDonald’s and other big fast-food chains have avoided responsibility in such cases, on the premise that their thousands of franchisees are the real employers, not the corporate giant in whose name they operate. If, as expected, Griffin’s ruling is upheld by the full NLRB, it could give a major boost to efforts to organize workers at the $5.6 billion chain, or at the very least pressure the company to raise wages and improve working conditions: McDonald’s will no longer be able to claim that such decisions are within the purview of each individual franchisee, and unions may no longer have to go about the near-impossible task of organizing restaurants outlets one-by-one.

“This strikes at the heart of the low-wage franchise model, which passes the buck to the franchisees while companies make huge amounts of profit,” said Kendall Fells, executive director of Fast Food Forward, a union-backed campaign that’s been agitating for higher wages and better working conditions, in a conference call with reporters. “We’ve had McDonald’s workers fighting on the ground with the argument that ultimately the company is responsible for all the working conditions under them…Now we have the board saying they agree with these workers. This is…a big shock to the industry as a whole and McDonald’s specifically. It puts it on the hook for everything that’s happening in the stores—wages, wage theft, health and safety, workers passing out in the store because it’s too hot…McDonald’s now is not in a position to distance themselves.”

The National Restaurant Association and International Franchise Association decried the finding, and conservatives are sure to tie it to another major move by Griffin’s predecessor as NLRB general counsel, to block Boeing’s move of thousands of jobs from pro-union Washington state to anti-union South Carolina. But the NLRB is on more solid political ground in this case.

Even as the push to raise the federal $7.25 minimum wage has stalled against Republican opposition in Congress, advocates for low-wage service workers have been winning plenty of local victories, while rallying public opinion to their side. Democratic-led Massachusetts, Connecticut and Seattle, among other jurisdictions, have all raised their minimum wage above $10—Seattle will be at $15 next year—while even the Republican-dominated government in Michigan approved an increase to $9.25, to head off a ballot referendum for yet higher-levels this fall. Major employers are feeling the pressure, too—facing strikes, Johns Hopkins Hospital recently agreed to a deal that raises wages for veteran service workers to $15 per hour. Democratic candidates are campaigning on a higher minimum wage, even in red states like Kentucky. And polls suggest they’re smart to do so, with even a majority of Republican voters saying they support raising the minimum wage. Put simply, most Americans get that it’s just not right for someone who works full-time scrubbing bathrooms or flipping burgers or emptying bedpans be earning well below the poverty level. (And no, most fast-food workers are not teenagers taking their first step on the job ladder, happy to be getting experience and some gas money: more than two-thirds of fast-food workers are over the age of 20.)