In 2023, California passed a law raising the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour. The usual suspects predicted that it would be a disaster, leading to massive job losses and making the food unaffordable for consumers.
Since the law was enacted in 2024, the University of California-Berkeley has recently released its third study into the impact of the law. Let's just say that the collapse of society because workers got paid a living wage was greatly exaggerated.
The study again proved that there was no loss in employment and that prices climbed so negligibly that it would barely be noticed by the consumers. But that's not to say the wage hike had no effect. It had a major one:
It significantly improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of California workers in many of the industry’s largest fast-food chains, with an average wage increase of more than 10%.
Those results have held steady across three years of work by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. They also align with a previous study on the California law conducted jointly by Harvard University’s Kennedy Center and UC San Francisco, as well as with long-established research showing that minimum wage increases generally don’t affect employment numbers or prices much.
Oh, the humanity!
The fast food industry tried to argue that the higher wage did cost the state 10,700 jobs, but it turned out that they started counting 10 months before the law went into effect. Another study showed that the costs of food went up and that restaurants were replacing workers with automation, but that was debunked when the "researchers" only interviewed restaurant owners and not any workers.
Maybe these anti-worker groups should try explaining why increasing the wages of workers would be disastrous, but raising the wages of the CEOs is just "good business."
