Starting Monday, most California fast-food workers will earn at least $20 an hour — the highest minimum wage across the U.S. restaurant industry. Yet the pay hike is sparking furious debate, with some restaurant owners warning of job losses and higher prices for customers, while labor advocates tout the benefits of higher wages.
The new law, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom last fall, takes effect on April 1, requiring that fast-food chains with at least 60 locations nationwide pay workers at least $20 an hour. The means the state’s 553,000 fast-food workers will earn more than the state’s $16 minimum wage for all other industries.
The new baseline wage comes as the fast-food industry is seeing booming earnings, with big chains like McDonald’s enjoying strong revenue growth and wider profit margins in recent years. That’s partly due to menu prices that have far outpaced inflation, with fast-food costs surging 47% over the past decade, compared with an average of 29% for all other prices, according to a new analysis from the Roosevelt Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
And the wild thing is that 20$/hr is not enough to live on for most people in most of California
Idk how anyone besides the wealthy survives in California. Someone sent me a job in my field starting at 150k in San Francisco. On paper, it would be really great money for what I do, but the cost of living would make it a poverty wage. I’m not interested in having 6 roommates at this point in my life.
100k w/four housemates is enough to eat, have fun, and save a wee bit in SF!
:) heh yeah wildly expensive. No accident the place is in high demand though 🌁🌉* And that’s in spite of parts of downtown feeling like they must be the fentanyl capital of the world. Western half of the city lives a different life than those stuck in e.g. the Tenderloin, very sad whether working class or homeless.
*emoji depict the Golden Gate Bridge at least on Apple devices
$20 is not even a living wage for a family. And in California, that’s basically still a starvation wage. Better than nothing I guess. There should be a law along with this wage increase that prohibits these fuckers from
rasingraising their food prices.I feel like the only reason it passed is because it’s still not a living wage here. If they pushed for something actually able to afford an individual a life, it would have been shot down.
There should be a law along with this wage increase that prohibits these fuckers from rasing their food prices.
Most of the high cost of living in California is due to very high housing prices. It’s not food.
https://www.salary.com/tools/cost-of-living-calculator/los-angeles-ca-expense-details
Energy is also high, but one – hopefully – isn’t spending as much on energy as housing.
If one wants to reduce the cost of living in California, what one wants to do is reduce barriers to building more housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement
The YIMBY movement has been particularly strong in California, a state experiencing a substantial housing shortage crisis. Since 2017, YIMBY groups in California have pressured California state and its localities to pass laws to expedite housing construction, follow their own zoning laws, and reduce the stringency of zoning regulations. YIMBY activists have also been active in helping to enforce state law on housing by bringing law-breaking cities to the attention of authorities.
Things have been slowly moving on this front.
In general, there is stronger local opposition to new housing construction locally than at a high level. Like, people are okay with housing in abstract, but don’t want riff-raff moving into the neighborhood, or don’t want the nice field near them to be built on or don’t want higher-density housing to keep their view of the sky as broad as possible or whatever. So California’s had legislative work recently at the state level in disallowing localities from blocking new housing construction. Hopefully, it’ll get the rate of construction moving.
Not just reduce the barrier but also stop these companies form buying up all the houses. If someone can dictate how much rent we pay then the problem will never truly be solved. These companies can afford to just sit on an empty property while it just gains value over time, they don’t have an incentive to reduce prices to get people in. The incentives should be punishments not gains for these companies. It’s the only real way to fix stuff.
In California, near me, the closest McDonalds, Panera’s, and Togo’s have adopted kiosk-based ordering, which takes the human out of the ordering loop. None are pure kiosk (at least not yet).
The Panera’s also had orders dropped off at tables, and appears to have ended that practice; they also removed the numbered buzzers. Now they’ll notify a cell phone if a number was entered at the kiosk, and if not, call the name on the receipt from the pickup counter.
EDIT: Actually, as a result of this conversation, I went over to the Togo’s in question, where the manager – who I think, from hearing her talk to people during some remodeling work, is also the owner of this particular franchise location – was working the counter along with some other employees. She confirmed that Togo’s was gonna see the minimum wage increase, sounded worried about what it was gonna do to costs. Then immediately the other guy waiting at the pick-up counter started complaining about California housing costs and both of the two started complaining to each other about inflation.
The cell phone thing is for data collection fyi, buzzers are cheap.
Yeah, I don’t want to be in their database so opt to have my name called, but often miss them calling from the pickup counter now. It is definitely obnoxious.
Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone has built a database linking phone numbers to Bluetooth UUIDs? I assume that software on a cell phone can obtain the phone number and the Bluetooth UUID and the full name of the user, so probably free-to-play games and the like will sell it.
And if that’s the case, if you correlate with that data, you can identify customers from the Bluetooth UUIDs.
Some places, like big box stores, do track the cell phones of people in the store. And you can bet that they correlate that with all the other info on you that they have.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/stores-spy-on-customers-by-tracking-cell-phones/
From Snopes, just thought it is relevant.
McDonald’s workers in Denmark truly make more than $20 an hour. It’s worth repeating, however, that these wages were not determined by the country’s minimum wage. In fact, Denmark does not have a nationwide minimum wage. Rather, the country has a robust union presence and issues such as wages and vacation time are often decided via collective bargaining.
Another point that is often raised when comparing McDonald’s wages in Denmark vs. the United States is how much these wages impact menu prices. While we can’t provide any exact figures here, we can say that the change in price isn’t extreme. A review by The New York Times, for instance, found that Big Macs cost “about 27 cents more on average in Denmark than in the United States.” But according to the “Big Mac Index” from the Economist, a Big Mac costs 76 cents less in “Denmark (US $4.90) than in the United States (US$5.66) at market exchange rates.”
I remember reading an article about strawberry pickers out here in California about 25 years ago. The math in the article said they could triple the pay of the pickers, and it would add a similar amount (around $0.20) per carton at retail. But we can’t do that for some fucking reason.
Imagine not having to use illegal immigrants as an option yet you guys would rather pay $.20 less.
By “you guys” you mean the executives at Dole and Delmonte that would rather pocket the $0.20 per pint themselves than pay a fair wage, right?
Maybe they should just try building some dense housing so the people making $20 got some where to live that’s not with 3 other people in a house built for 1
Can’t let good be the enemy of great
Except for Panera who get a cut-out because the CEO is a childhood friend of Gavin Newsom. Like I’ve been saying for years: Democrats are just Republicans draped in a rainbow flag.
I thought that got scratched out? Either way yes these shouldn’t have targeted exceptions that don’t pass the smell test.
It didn’t get scratched out. It was never true in the first place. I don’t know why the bakery exemption was in there – apparently no one who isn’t on a confidentiality agreement does – but Panera apparently never would’ve qualified as one under it. The disinfo game from the right on this was on point.
