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fast food
California's $20 Fast Food Worker Minimum Wage Kicks In
"Fast food companies can afford to pay $20/hour without raising prices or cutting hours," said the California Fast Food Workers Union. "Doing either is a choice. Don't let them tell you otherwise."
Apr 01, 2024
A new California law raising the minimum wage for most fast food workers from $16 to $20 an hour took effect Monday, a move cheered by labor advocates who dismissed—and debunked—claims by an industry reaping record profits that the pay hike would force restaurant chains to raise prices and cut jobs.
The law applies to restaurants at national fast food chains with at least 60 locations and that have limited or no table service. Restaurants inside supermarkets and establishments that bake and sell bread are exempt. Twenty dollars is just a starting point, as a state law also established a Fast Food Council that can raise wages by up to 3.5% annually through 2029.
"The vast majority of fast food locations in California operate under the most profitable brands in the world," Joseph Bryant, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement. "Those corporations need to pay their fair share and provide their operators with the resources they need to pay their workers a living wage without cutting jobs or passing the cost to consumers."
As the California Fast Food Workers Union noted:
- From 2015 to 2023, California raised the minimum wage by 72%, from $9 an hour to $15.50 an hour;
- While the minimum wage was rising, fast food restaurants in California added 142,000 jobs; and
- The minimum wage has increased every year in California since 2015, and so has the number of fast food jobs in California, except for 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit.
California Fast Food Worker Union also pointed out that "numerous academic studies confirm: When states and cities pass big minimum wage increases, employers either add jobs or there is no or minimal effect on employment."
BREAKING: Today hundreds of fast food workers from across California are in LA to officially launch the California Fast Food Workers Union
We've won a Fast Food Council
We've won $20/hr
Now we're doing whatever it takes to win annual raises, just cause, and more#UnionsForAll pic.twitter.com/pykRKZF0PV
— California Fast Food Workers Union (@CAFastFoodUnion) February 9, 2024
The union highlighted various studies, including one in 2024 that found no fast food jobs were lost when California and New York increased their minimum wage to $15; another in 2018 that showed a slight increase in restaurant and food service employment in six cities that raised their minimum wage; and yet another in 2021 revealing hikes in state and local minimum wages had no effect on McDonald's opening or closing restaurants.
"According to the data, there's no reason why the new fast food minimum wage of $20 per hour in California should mean layoffs or increased prices," Alí Bustamante, deputy director for the Worker Power and Economic Security program at the Roosevelt Institute, said last week. "Profits in the fast food industry are sufficiently high to absorb the greater operating costs and ensure industry workers are paid fairly."
As More Perfect Union noted, McDonald's made $8.5 billion in profit last year, while Burger King's parent company raked in $1.2 billion, and Starbucks enjoyed $4.1 billion in profits.
Additionally, a new Roosevelt Institute analysis co-authored by Bustamante found that the 10 largest publicly traded fast food companies spent $6.1 billion on stock buybacks last year alone. This, while fast food prices soared by 46.8% over the past decade compared with 28.7% for the average of all prices. In 2023, fast food companies charged their customers 27% above their production costs. Critics have accused these and other corporations of "greedflation."
"In 2022, fast food industry employment in California had increased to approximately 553,000 workers—a 20.1% increase since 2014," the analysis notes. "Trends in the California fast food labor market have mirrored the national averages. Yet between 2014 and 2023, the federal minimum wage remained stagnant at $7.25 per hour, while California's minimum wage increased from $9 to $15.50 an hour—further evidence that California fast food firms can readily adjust to minimum wage increases."
The U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not been raised since 2009, and that amount is worth far less now than it was then due to inflation.
"This is an insult to American workers and bad for our economy," former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich said in a video published Monday by the Gravel Institute.
"It's simply a myth that raising the wage automatically means lost jobs," Reich asserted. "Here's the bottom line: If your business depends on paying your workers starvation wages, you should not be in business."
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'When We Fight, We Win': California Fast Food Workers Launch Union
Workers have shown "when they come together what kind of power they can have to really take on massive corporations like Starbucks, McDonald's, and Burger King," said one labor leader.
Feb 09, 2024
With plans to win annual raises and other labor protections for fast food cooks and cashiers across California, hundreds of workers in the industry gathered in Los Angeles on Friday to mark the launch of a first-of-its kind union.
Part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the new California Fast Food Workers Union represents workers at companies including McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Jack in the Box, and organizers hope to eventually expand its membership to other employees in the industry in addition to cooks and cashiers.
The union was formed after fast food workers, the SEIU, and the Fight for $15 movement fought for the passage of a California law last year that created a fast food council, allowing labor unions and companies to negotiate over minimum wages and work conditions—a first for the industry.
The SEIU reached a deal with several chains to raise the minimum pay for 500,000 fast food workers to $20 per hour starting in April.
"California fast food workers have powered through and we've been winning against one of the largest industries in the world," said one worker in a video posted on social media by the union to celebrate the launch.
Joseph Bryant, international executive vice-president of the SEIU, noted that the push for labor protections and higher wages in the industry has "been led in California over the last decade by primarily Black and Latino cooks and cashiers."
The workers "have been fighting and have been able to show when they come together what kind of power they can have to really take on massive corporations like Starbucks, McDonald's, and Burger King, which have done everything to crush their workers and crush the idea of them pulling together a union," Bryant told The Guardian.
The union plans to push for a 3.5% increase of the minimum wage over the next three years, protections to ensure companies have "just cause" to fire workers, rules to ensure that employees are scheduled to work enough hours to sustain themselves, and protections against retaliation for organizing.
Fight for $15 called the launch "an historic day."
"Fast food workers have worked for more than a decade to come to this point," said the nationwide grassroots organization. "We're so excited to be here, and even more excited for what's to come."
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An Alternate National Food Mandate
America seems to have a romance with disease.
Nov 11, 2020
Here is my National Mandate. Close all fast-food chains. Put orange cone roadblocks on all Dunkin' Donuts drive-thrus. Ban the sale of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The war was not between those two Colas; it was a war against the human body.
The masks mask the elephant in the room. No human being can make a potent immune system with a diet of processed food and sugar. This promiscuous virus seems to have a field day with the obese and the immune-compromised. The national and worldwide addiction to sugar presents a feeding frenzy for a virus that, like all viruses, feeds on sugar. Where are the scientists and leaders who can guide the populations of the world to actually combat the virus by starving it and also by strengthening its targets? We are told to behave like boxers in a corner with our gloves up to our faces as we are pummeled.
We need to resuscitate the slogan Resist and put it at the center of our actual physical bodies. The Thymus gland makes T-cells. Thymus is a Greek word for courage and anger; two strong words that will strengthen resistance.
Ireland determined recently that the rolls produced by the fast-food chain Subway have too much sugar in it to be called bread. This just begins to tell the tale. Biden, Fauci, and the posse of "experts" say nothing about what evolution and nature has made clear - T-cells are our Personal Protective Device. You cannot make powerful T-cells from a Big Mac, fries and Coke or a cream filled, white flour doughnut. A virus can present itself to a human body and a human body armed with healthy T-cells will most likely evict it quickly and not give it a chance to colonize and inflame. The primary exhortation from the top should be about about this aspect of human health.
Government guidance and a support stipend is the best path forward. Like Victory gardens during WWII, there ought to be individual citizen projects of cultivating potent health as the wall of resistance to this virus which, like a predator, will pick out the weak targets in a herd.
I can't speak for the rest of the world but America seems to have a romance with disease. Cable stations exist to sell drugs and as they do, they romanticize disease. The wistful looks of the stricken, the sentimental music, the loving looks of spouse and family on the patient all work to make the disease seem to be a pathway to love and enlightenment, and the patented drug you must take forever will keep you alive long enough to bask in this glow. Hopefully one day we will look at these commercials the way we look at doctor-recommended cigarette ads from the 1950's we now watch on Youtube with horror and macabre amusement.
In the case of COVID, we are presented with numbers and charts and interviews with beleaguered hospital workers. Experts tell us what they know and what they don't know both ending up by the end of the interview to be useless. By omission or myopia, these experts seem to be saying to all of us is, "Eat any junk you want and live any way you care to but wear a mask and wash your hands and stay six feet apart." This has always had the echo of six feet under - a distance that has the hint of death to it.
The ultimate infantilizing of the citizenry - mask, wash up, and go to your room. Not to say that these prescriptions don't have a place at this moment but to me, if this is all you've got, it smacks of impotence and surrender and a serious abdication.
Driving here in Connecticut in the morning I will pass a line at the drive-thru at Dunkin' Donuts - 20 cars long. Burger King will do "no contact delivery." It's not the contact that's the real or only risk factor it's what is being delivered. Processed, sugar-laced food is like sludge in a human body and a human body can only make new cells with what it is being given. The revolution does indeed start in the kitchen.
Until the feckless and myopic experts begin to take this point as seriously as they do the mask instruction, no matter how much obedience they are able to influence, we will continue to have more spikes than the shoe franchise at a Trump golf course.
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