California’s fast-food minimum wage hike is already getting people fired
Zachary Faria
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California’s minimum wage hike for fast food workers is throwing hundreds out of their jobs already, and the law doesn’t come into effect until April.
Multiple Pizza Hut locations in California are now laying off their delivery drivers, resulting in 1,200 delivery drivers in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties hitting the unemployment line. The minimum wage hike for fast food workers will be jumping from $16 an hour to $20 an hour, which is going to lead to fast food franchises across the state reevaluating their finances at the expense of regular Californians.
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The biggest losers will be consumers, who are already dealing with the effects of inflation, who will be saddled with even higher prices as companies try to make up for more spending on employees. Chipotle will be increasing its prices by 18%, and McDonald’s has already said it will be raising its prices after acknowledging that low-income consumers are eating out less. Automation will also continue throughout the fast food industry, making it easier for companies like McDonald’s to cut down on hiring in place of kiosks to take people’s orders.
But consumers won’t be off the hook if restaurants take the Pizza Hut route of firing workers, either. Pizza Hut will now be relying on third-party apps to deliver pizzas, such as DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats. Those apps have their own added fees and markups, meaning that Pizza Hut laying off its own delivery drivers isn’t going to stop prices from going up.
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All of this is because California did not actually change the minimum wage. The minimum wage in California for fast food workers isn’t $16 or $20; it is zero. Pizza Hut’s delivery drivers have learned that the hard way. People displaced by self-order kiosks at McDonald’s have learned the same. When the minimum wage goes up, it increases the risk that current workers are fired or prospective workers are unable to get hired. The lucky ones who land and keep jobs get the new higher minimum wage; the unlucky ones become unemployed.
The only people who evidently haven’t learned this yet are California Democrats, who created the council that raised this minimum wage and reserve the right to continue raising it through 2029. California is going to keep making basic things more expensive while running people out of their jobs and patting itself on the back as a smaller and smaller pool of workers gets continued minimum wage increases while a growing pool is introduced to the unemployment line.