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.
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
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.