Minimum wage hike: California leads nation in fast food worker pay

By James On Sep 29, 2023

A new law in California will raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour next year, a recognition by the state’s Democratic leaders that most of its often overlooked workforce are the primary earners for their low-income households .

When it goes into effect on April 1, fast food workers in California will have the highest guaranteed base pay in the industry. The state’s minimum wage for all other workers — $15.50 an hour — is already among the highest in the United States.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law Thursday amid a crowd of cheering workers and union leaders at an event in Los Angeles. Mr. Newsom rejected the popular view that fast-food jobs are for teenagers to get their first work experience.

“That’s a romanticized version of a world that doesn’t exist,” Mr. Newsom said. “We have the opportunity to reward that contribution, reward that sacrifice and stabilize an industry.”

Mr. Newsom’s signature reflects the power and influence of unions in the nation’s most populous state, which have worked to organize fast-food workers in an effort to improve their wages and working conditions.

It also settles — for now at least — a battle between labor and business groups over how the industry should be regulated. In exchange for higher wages, unions have dropped their attempt to hold fast-food companies accountable for the misdeeds of their independent franchisees in California, a move that could have upended the business model on which the industry is based. The sector has meanwhile agreed to remove a referendum on workers’ wages from the 2024 ballot.

“That was a tectonic plate that had to be moved,” Mr. Newsom said, referring to what he said was the more than 100 hours of negotiations it took to reach an agreement on the bills in the final weeks of the legislative session of the state.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union International, said the law restricts a decade of work — including 450 strikes across the state in the past two years.

The moment was almost too much for Anneisha Williams, who held back tears as she spoke at a news conference just before Mr. Newsom signed the bill. Mrs. Williams, a mother of six children — seven, if you count her beloved dog — works at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Inglewood.

“They’ve been on the picket line with me, and they’ve marched with me too,” Ms. Williams said of her children. “This is for them.”

Mr. Newsom’s signing of the bill could win back some favor with organized labor, which sharply criticized him last week for vetoing a separate bill aimed at protecting truck drivers’ jobs amid the rise of self-driving technology. Unions have played a major role in Mr. Newsom’s political rise in California, providing a reliable source of campaign cash.

Mr. Newsom’s appearance in Los Angeles comes a day after the Republican presidential candidates — but not Donald Trump — appeared at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley for their second televised debate. Mr. Newsom denies any interest in a White House presidency but has positioned himself as an enemy of Republican candidates and has traveled around the country criticizing conservative positions on abortion and gun rights. His actions on hundreds of bills before him can be viewed through the lens of his future political ambitions.

The new minimum wage for fast food workers will apply to restaurants with at least 60 locations nationwide, with the exception of restaurants that make and sell their own bread, such as Panera Bread.

Currently, fast food workers in California earn an average of $16.60 per hour, or just over $34,000 per year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s less than the California Poverty Measure for a family of four, a statistic calculated by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Equality that takes into account housing costs and publicly funded benefits.

The new $20 minimum wage is just a starting point. The law creates a Fast Food Council with the power to increase that wage each year through 2029 by 3.5% or the change in the averages of the U.S. Consumer Price Index for urban wage and white-collar workers, whichever is lower .

Now the focus will shift to another group of low-wage workers in California waiting for their own minimum wage increase. Lawmakers passed a separate bill earlier this month that would gradually raise the minimum wage for health care workers to $25 an hour over the next decade. That increase would not apply to doctors and nurses, but to virtually everyone who works in hospitals, dialysis clinics or other health care facilities.