Unlike the secession thread, this has happened and it doesn’t take Nostradamus to know it’s going to get worse before it gets worse.
I’m not going to look up all the cites, but this is what I remember so far.
Pizza Hut is laying off all their delivery drivers. 1000 and change jobs.
Many restaurants will be dropping PTO. Not sure how many locations that will affect.
Many places will be cutting hours to further avoid accidental overtime. The restaurants I worked at in school were pretty on top of the OT game, but now it’s dialed up to 11.
One method of accomplishing that will be to have 2 employees working 16 hours instead of 1 working 32.
Employees will be laid off and their duties distributed among the rest. This is standard payroll reduction 101, small comfort to the formerly employed.
Most restaurants have enough slack time in duties that this can work so long as they don’t go overboard with the layoffs enough to drive away the remaining workers.
Profit margins are notoriously thin (3-7% depending on who you ask) for restaurants so price increases are inevitable.
Fast food is supposed to be fast and affordable. Losing affordable is going to be a kill shot for too many places. Fortunately the $20 wage doesn’t apply to mom & pop shops, so while some of their people will be trying to score the money, they can be replaced by the previously mentioned layoffs.
One article I read projected that workers will be making something like 13% less due to hours being cut.
So you’re telling me that fast food isn’t capable of making a profit unless it exploits its workers and doesn’t pay them enough to keep them off the streets.
Californians in two industries are set to get new minimum wages just for them next year, and that could lead to pay bumps for other workers, too.
Gov. Gavin Newsom this year signed two union-backed bills that will boost fast-food and health care workers’ minimum wages.
California-based fast-food workers for chains with 60 or more locations around the nation will earn at least $20 an hour beginning in April, $4 higher than the overall state minimum wage of $16 that will be effective Jan. 1., The two new laws are expected to trigger pay increases for about 900,000 Californians, some of whom are earning more than minimum wage today.
They are going into effect in a competitive labor market that has seen employers, especially small businesses, struggling to hire and retain workers. California’s unemployment rate is at 4.8%, which is higher compared with the federal unemployment rate of 3.7% but is near a historic low.
This is actually a very good idea. Now the companies can hire workers better, and those workers- who rarely work FT or get benefits- now get a decent pay.
Let me let you in on a little secret- Newsom and co have top notch highly paid analysts and economists.
Yeah. those dickheads at Pizza Hut are gonna lay off 9000 workers. California has nearly 9million employed people. Do the math. This isnt going to affect the unemployment rate much.
Yeah, I see no problem with that. A few months back when I picked up one of my usual take-outs I sort of grumbled that the price was higher than it had been last time. The nice young girl behind the counter said a new minimum wage law had just come into effect, which I then remembered having read about, and I felt bad for making the comment. I said in that case I had no problem with the price increase. People deserve to earn a living wage and the fact that employees are young is no excuse to exploit them.
Pizza Hut isn’t doing this because of minimum wage laws they’re doing this because it’s cheaper for them to rely on Door Dash and Uber Eats.
I’m willing to pay a few bucks more to ensure people make decent wages. Quite frankly, if your business model relies on exploiting people you don’t deserve to be in business.
“Oh gosh, you’re raising the minimum wage? Guess we’ll be forced to lay off a bunch of workers. We don’t want to, but you’re forcing our hand. We’re just a small scrappy multinational trillion-dollar corporation and these pay hikes are going to bankrupt us.”
It’s extortionist rhetoric, and it crops up every time states make noise about ensuring their employees make a living wage.
That’s enough to pay for almost 400 delivery drivers getting 40 hours a week at the new minimum wage. 650 if we assume they’re going to be as greedy as possible and schedule them 24 hours a week so they don’t have to give them healthcare. Maybe that’s where they should be making cuts. Do we even need a CEO? Just have an AI do it.
No. I’m not saying that it has to happen, only that it will. I’m not in favor of hours or benefits being cut, but other measures are reasonable. Workforce reduction resulting in others having to pick up the slack. I’ve been on both sides of that equation and made out just fine. I’ll be more than thrilled to come back in a year having been proved wrong.
May be. But the minimum wage hike is a big part of the impetus to do it now rather than in a year or three.
Sure. You and I can afford it. But what about families that consider a trip to Arby’s tp be a treat. They’ll stay home and hopefully have something healthier, but that’s not paying fast food wages.
If you can get him to go for it, I’ll back your play all day.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed laws lifting the minimum wage for California fast-food and health care workers. Will others see pay increases, too?
What possible rationale is there for just doing an increase for two industries: minimum wage laws should apply across the board.
However I think minimum wage laws should vary geographically: much lower in poor areas. Look at a town like Huron, California:
The median household income was $24,609 and the median family income was $23,939. Males had a median income of $21,656 versus $16,442 for females. The per capita income for the city was $9,425. About 38.3% of families and 39.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 48.4% of those under age 18 and 10.7% of those age 65 or over.
But some posters here really think the bottom worker at McDonald’s should earn $40,000 a year here (assuming a full-time job)?
Expecting a “living wage” for an entry level fast food restaurant job is never going to happen. Now it is undoubtedly true that entry level job wages would be much higher, except there is no shortage of unskilled labor. Millions of unskilled have been pouring across the border every year for decades. The law of supply and demand has not been repealed.
I guess it depends on how you define “living wage”. Someone working full time @ $20/hr with two weeks off annually would be grossing $40K/yr. No one is going to get rich on that, but it ought to be enough to get by. Maybe a high school kid working part-time could justifiably be paid less, but an adult responsible for their own cost of living and possibly that of a family deserves better than a high school kid just looking to earn some spending money.
Otherwise the adult destroys themselves working multiple jobs and/or becomes a burden on the welfare system and lives in miserable poverty just so corporate fat cats can enjoy bigger profits. This is a burden on society in more ways that just cost. Some socially responsible businesses pay decent wages and provide decent benefits without having to be forced to by law. What I’m mainly saying is that the incremental added cost to takeout food is not very high if fairly applied and not used as an excuse to artificially jack up prices, and I’m willing to pay it.
When I go to fast food restaurants these days, the employees don’t seem so young. These are folks in their twenties, thirties, for forties. The average age of a fast food worker is 26 according to Data USA. We still have this perception of teenagers working these fast food jobs when most of them are adults likely with real bills and maybe even kids of their own.
Fast food or no fast food, eating at restaurants all the time is never going to be cheap.
If the state is calculating, whether their calculation be well-founded or erroneous, the minimum wage, then presumably it should apply to everyone working in that state, regardless of industry or location. They cannot worry about all the different union wages or who lives in a shantytown.
You think the national fast food chains - with high visibility and deep pockets - are going to hire undocumented workers unless they can’t get any others? Anyhow the low unemployment rate and the massive number of help wanted signs I see in my part of the Bay Area makes me think that the work force is just fine.