Do you need a good job but don't have any skills? Move to California! We just passed a bill that sets up a Fast Food Council, and among other things it's tasked with setting a new minimum wage for the industry. The legislation caps the minimum wage at $22 per hour in 2023, which presumably means the minimum wage will be $22 per hour.
That's not bad. It's only a couple of bucks short of what a beginning teacher makes. It's 25% higher than the individual median income. It's more than a bookkeeper makes. It's more than a lab tech makes. It's more than a delivery driver makes. It's more than an EMT makes. It's more than a construction worker makes. It's more than a carpenter makes.
Anyway, it seems a wee bit high to me. Maybe the new council will keep it lower than $22. Or maybe Gov. Gavin Newsom won't sign the bill. Who knows?
" The legislation *********caps********** the minimum wage at $22 per hour in 2023, which presumably means the minimum wage will be $22 per hour."
Are we sure it was just 4th grade reading skills that declined?
It forces NOTHING on the industry. The team will be very raucous and get nothing done.
Assume you are right and the commission somehow compels the industry to go to $22 per hour, the maximum allowed.
Most fast-food jobs are part-time. How many part-time hours at $22/hour would these workers need to exceed the full-time pay plus benefits received by lab techs, or bookkeepers, or teachers?
But think of the teenagers! Their jobs will disappear.
Actually no. Fast food jobs as teenage or starter jobs disappeared a long time ago. When I go into my fast foot burger joint of choice, the staff are all adults, And it has been that way for years.
Since the minimum wage for part time teenagers in CA is 15% less than the minimum wage for adults, this would increase the incentive to hire teenagers.
I'm trying to think of where I've seen a teenager working recently and all I can come up with is a stall at the farmer's market.
In more rural northern CA lots of teenagers work after school. My oldest grandson works at a Papa Murphy’s.
My nephew bags groceries. This is suburban Boston. And he's an excellent student. I wasn't a huge fan of the idea when I heard about it (he's only 15, and his parents make enough to give him an allowance) but I'm just the uncle, so I have no say.
But he seems to be doing fine!
Here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia I still see a lot of teenagers working in fast-food. Maybe it's a regional thing. If their alternative to earn a few bucks is to work on a farm, than pushing burgers ain't so bad.
👌🏼👌🏼
…”The new version of the bill also limits the minimum wage from rising above $22 an hour in 2023”…
I’m not following?
The previous version didn't have any cap. Some conservative democrat stupidly inserted a ridiculous number for a cap. Note the governor gets 20% of the positions on the board as do employers. The governor opposes this bill and doesn't believe fast food workers should be treated differently than other worker, o there is no chance tht the minimum wage for fast food workers is going to be raised in the short term as a result of this bill.
Sorry, messed up my comment, employers get 40%of the positions.
As to employees. An earlier version had employees outnumbering employers.
Grr As do employers…
Are they going to force them to maintain the same staffing levels? Because I'd wager about half would be laid off at any given store. Seems as well thought out as demanding electric cars without a grid to support it.
Employers hire as many people for as many hours as the work requires. There are not at present a whole lot of workers standing around doing nothing that employers keep because wages are low. An increase in wages would only lead to layoffs if it led to a reduction in sales.
Quite right.
If you have a better way to force employers to provide a comfortable wage than "force them to do so using the law" I should like to hear it.
Unions work pretty well, where the state labor laws allow them to function.
"The legislation caps the minimum wage at $22 per hour in 2023, which presumably means the minimum wage will be $22 per hour" That would be a completely imbecilic assumption. There is precisely zero chance that the minimum wage will be set at 22$ an hour.
When did dollar signs start getting put after the number instead of before? As far as I can tell, both standard American and British English require the currency symbol before the number: $22, £22, €22 etc.
Around Sunnyvale, In-N-Out is already upwards of $20 an hour.
I live in Bozeman, MT and around here there's a tire store offering $25/hr for a tire changer. Fast food joints are offering $17-$20/hr and can't fill all their shifts. So it's not just the gulch where fast food joints are having to offer that much.
For some part of California, such as the inland empire, $22 per hour is wholly inappropriate: IF this comes to form, there will be significant fast food displacement in some parts of CA.
The republicans in Illinois, down state, complain that Chicago ignores them. They think kids are being lazy for not staying in town and working at the plant or warehouse for $15/HR. Yes, less than $30K a year.
It's cheaper there. Instead of a million dollar fixer upper, you could find something around $100K for a house, and it will have a yard. Of course you'll need a car, preferably a decked out truck that costs more than your house.
When I was growing up, $15/HR was a good job, and it would have full benefits plus retirement. And a family would need only one income. Here's the thing, it is today, not 50 years ago.
I see fast food places all over Portland offering $18-21
I don't live in California so I have to accept what the people there say. However, I find it hard to believe that in California a journeyman carpenter is paid less than $22/hr. I would have expected something in the $30-$40 range.
California is a large state. The waves in say Barstow are MATERIALLY different than San Francisco. Near major CA cities (Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento etc) wages are much higher than rural areas such the inland empire.
The ones in Huntington Beach are better than either of those two places.
Manhattan Beach is the best beach.
Hey, I grew up there!
30th St. for me. How many of you schools still exist in MB? All of mine gone....
Been in Barstow. Didn’t see waves. 😀
Wait for The Big One.
Good. High wages are always good. If you can't pay your workers enough to ensure them a comfortable living, the job in question shouldn't exist.
I also don't understand this comparison to other workers in other jobs; that seems wholly irrelevant.
The comparison to other industries is to remind you that a min wage increase might cause wages to rise in other jobs. Often this is presented as bad news in a horrified tone.
Wage increases are always presented as good when the discussion is in generalities....but get down to specifics or actual wage increases and many people change their tune.
A lot of purposeful messaging tactics over the years have ensured that many wage earners see other people's wage increases in a bad light.
22$/hr is more than an LPN/CNA makes in a senior living/assisted living community in the collar counties of Chicagoland (I can't say for the City). Not an RN but they are the minority in these facilities. The bulk of staff make around 15-18$/hr to wipe ass, feed your granny, and start CPR.
I know the West Coast is definitely a different place but c'mon...
I know the West Coast is definitely a different place but c'mon...
VERY DIFFERENT in terms of housing from Chicago. MEDIAN single family house in Bay Area is well over a million. Average one bedroom rent in Silicon Valley is around three grand.
And SoCal is almost as bad.
Not everyone in CA lives in the three big metros, but about 3/4ths do...
Should add: there's a story out of Milpitas, CA (Bay Area town near San Jose) making the rounds. School district is pleading with town residents to take in teachers as borders. I'm not making that up. Median salary of teachers there isn't terrible—about $70k—but imagine spending $2,800/month on a shitty one bedroom apartment when your take home pay is, say, $4,100. (And at that price you may well have longish commute!). Of course new, starting teachers probably don't make even near that much.
Sheer insanity.
(I highly recommend the outlet mall there, if you're ever in the neighborhood; one of my favorites!)
From the last 18 months we know that higher wages kill jobs and destroy the economy. We just have to look around at the current higher wages and high unemployment, right?
We all remember the panic and tsk, tsking over the calls for $15 wages and now that we have arrived at $15 wages quicker than assumed, we see....DISASTER!!!
Right?
I'm all for being reasonably aggressive when it comes to raising the minimum wage. Whether $22 is too high or not I'll leave to the economists.
But what's the policy justification for a higher minimum wage for only this sector?
It is explicitly because they can't unionize and I expect it's also because they re at much higher risk of dying from covid.
Also, massive wage theft and low hours per week working.
I wonder what minimum wage we need to set to start getting CEOs to take a pay cut?
Say down to a miserly 100x median wage, rather than 300x-600x median?
It would be an interesting experiment to cap executive pay at a multiple of minimum wage, perhaps 100,000 times, or if we're feeling generous a million times. It would give those executives a personal motivation to support increasing the minimum wage.