California progressives raise minimum wage to $20, fast food jobs go up in smoke, man loses long career just like that

 

“Between last fall and January,” Ohanian wrote, “California fast-food restaurants cut about 9,500 jobs, representing a 1.3% change from September 2023.” By comparison, overall employment in California during that period fell just 0.2%.

More.  

Michael Ojeda, a Pizza Hut driver for eight years in Ontario, Calif., received notice in December that his last day would be in February, according to a letter from his former employer. Pizza Hut franchisee Southern California Pizza offered $400 in severance if he stayed through February, but Ojeda, who said he made hundreds of dollars a week in wages and tips as a delivery driver, went on unemployment instead.

 “Pizza Hut was my career for nearly a decade and with little to no notice it was taken away,” said Ojeda, 29, who previously supported his mother and partner on his Pizza Hut delivery wages.

Southern California Pizza didn’t respond to requests for comment. Pizza Hut said it was aware of some of its California franchisees changing their delivery services. 

-- The Wall Street Journal reported.

California fast food now more expensive since minimum wage hike

nbclosangeles.com

California fast-food prices are up as much as 8% since minimum wage hike

Helen Jeong, Amber Frias

April 18, 2024

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Since California’s new law went into effect to raise the minimum wage of fast-food workers, who are employed by chains of 60 restaurants and more, from $16 to $20 an hour, some fast-food chains have raised their food prices, according to a new study.

Kalinowski Equity Research said that menu prices at some restaurants have gone up as much as 8% since April 1. 

Wendy’s is leading the price hikes at 8% while Chipotle’s food prices have gone up 7.5%. 

As Starbucks’ food items are now 7% more expensive, customers at Taco Bell and Burger King are now paying 3% and 2% more respectively.

Starbucks confirmed its price increase, saying it was largely due to the minimum wage increase in the state. 

Wendy’s, Chipotle’s, Taco Bell and Burger King did not respond to NBC Los Angeles’ request for comments and confirmation. 

In response to the price increases, the California Restaurant Association said they were the “entirely predictable” results of the minimum wage increase. 

“Since it took effect, job losses, reduced working hours, restaurant closures and higher prices for California’s inflation-weary consumers have been ongoing,” the group said. 

Southern California who frequented fast-food restaurants for convenience and affordability said they are feeling the squeeze.

“I used to pay $10. Now it's $13. Over time that’ll be like $6 more or  $9 – it just keeps going,” Owen Peralta, a Chipotle customer in Brea, said. “If I'm going to start paying restaurant prices, then I'm going to have to go somewhere else.”

Specifically in the case of Chipote, its chicken burritos are now 8.3% pricer while steak burritos will cost customers 7% more.

Other customers hinted the rising food prices are changing the way fast food is perceived and consumed.

“[The rising prices] probably won’t stop me, but I’ll probably eat out less,” Cindy Tran, a Brea resident, said. 

“I’ll decide not to eat out probably a couple of times a month,” Mike Larson added.

The minimum wage of $0.40/hour from 1938 adjusted for inflation to today

 $8.71

Cry more.

Nancy Pelosi made sure the increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 in 2007 didn't apply to then-tuna capital American Samoa, and they still don't make it 15 years later

 

Fox News knucklehead: Colombian government proposals "would likely exasperate inequalities"

The government’s proposal to slash the minimum wage, salaries, and pension funds would likely exasperate these inequalities and was also a driving force behind the uprising.

More here about the recent massive anti-government protests.

Another knucklehead here just very recently had Colombia on the top ten list of best places to retire in the world.

Here's an extreme he hasn't thought of: Maybe try paying more than "above minimum wage"

The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but low-skilled jobs in Michigan start at $10.00 an hour, and pay even higher than that for competent, dependable people. The median wage for a production operator for a local company near me situated here just across the lake from the one in Manitowoc mentioned in the story below commands $13.57 an hour. 

From the story here:

Mike Fredrich shows off unmanned presses in his Manitowoc, Wisconsin, company. They're ready to start production at MCM Composites, a 55-person enterprise that makes custom thermoset molding. The only problem? Fredrich has no one to operate them. "These tools are heated to 300 degrees," he said. "But we're not running them. Had we had the people for the first shift, we could have been running this all day. But we don't, so they sit here heated, ready to go, with no action." Fredrich said the business has gone to extremes to try to find the 15 additional employees it needs. But he's had little success.

"There are no workers, but there's a huge demand. The economy has picked up, but the market is so thin, that we just can't find them. We've gone to extraordinary means to find people that will actually work, including going to the local county jail and recruiting people to work from inside the jail," Fredrich said. ...

Fredrich is also looking for a core staff of his own — low-skilled laborers he's willing to train and pay above minimum wage. "What they need to be able to do is come to work on time every day, pay attention to what they're doing, take instruction well, and just put in an honest day's work," he said.

Your kid probably isn't working this summer like he should be, because of the minimum wage and cheap immigrant labor

The population level of teenagers in 2017 has recovered to 1978 levels, but only 29% are employed in May 2017 vs. 47% in May 1978.

The minimum wage has made it too expensive to hire your kid to recover shopping carts at the grocery store, and soaring immigration means your kid competes against Francisco to cut the grass and Sanjay to sell ice cream.

Obama's poor make an emotional appearance at Iowa Democrat town hall, woman speaks of her shame

From the story here:

SANDERS: I want to hear what it is like if people, know people or themselves, what is it like to live on $12,000 a year, $10,000 a year on Social Security. We’ve got a mic right here? OK. Hold that mic close to you, please.

WOMAN: I’ve been living on probably less than that for a long time, because of disabilities. (Crying) It’s so hard to do anything to pay your bills. You’re ashamed all the time… When you can’t buy presents for your children, it’s really, really, really hard. And I worked 3, 4, 5 jobs sometimes, always minimum wage. I have a degree. I’m divorced, and it’s just, I’m waiting for disability to come through, so my parents have to support me.

Believe it or not, pick any level in $5,000 increments all the way up the income ladder starting at zero and you will see that there is a smaller percentage of Americans making that income in 2014 than in 2007 at every single one, with just a very few exceptions starting after the 99.992 percentile where fewer than 15,000 Americans fight over incomes over $4 million per year. The percentage of people making any given income is smaller in 2014 than in 2007 with the exception of the very highest earners.

Everything has shrunk under Barack Obama, except his ego.

We all have something to be ashamed about, not just the poor. 

And you thought I was kidding when I called Thomas Piketty's new book a novel

Diana Furchtgott-Roth for Real Clear Markets, here, eviscerates Thomas Piketty's presentation on the minimum wage:

One might overlook one isolated error as sloppiness to which we are all susceptible. But Professor Piketty's supposed history of changes in the minimum wage is not tarnished by a single error, but by a vast array of systematic errors.

His history is pure revisionist fiction, and revisionist fiction with a political purpose: making Democratic presidents look magnanimous and Republican presidents look uncaring. Yet, over the past quarter century, the period Piketty describes as showing a dramatic increase in inequality, Republican presidents signed into law larger percentage increases in the minimum wage than did Democratic presidents.

Blame The Yankees For The Minimum Wage: A Northern Tariff On The South

Doin' right ain't got no end

Jay Cost for The Weekly Standard, here:

Obama’s [State of the Union] address inadvertently referenced the government’s proclivity to play favorites. The minimum wage is a hallowed talking point for wealthy liberals posing as hardscrabble populists, but in fact its original purpose was to serve as a sort of domestic tariff. By 1937 Northern industries had come to terms with organized labor, but the South still resisted. Fearing a flight of capital to Dixie, it was Northern businessmen who made the difference in pushing a minimum wage through Congress.

Liberal Democrats had outsized majorities during this period of the New Deal, but Southerners controlled key choke points within the legislature, notably the House Rules Committee. It was only a broad coalition that included liberals, organized labor, and, crucially, Northern industrialists that brought the Fair Labor Standards Act to a vote on the floor. Unsurprisingly, the wage floor was set so low that only the South was really affected. And even then, it only passed after it was loaded up with exemptions for all sorts of politically privileged groups.

This decidedly inegalitarian back story of the minimum wage has mostly been lost to history. One would be hardpressed to find a book about the New Deal in Barnes & Noble that discusses this at any length. This is not a coincidence; advocates of bold, activist government want to forget all the inequalities it creates. So it is with Obama. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is one of the most grossly unfair pieces of legislation to become law in modern times. Underwritten by a logroll among elite interests as varied as the drug manufacturers and the feminist left, it is an enormous redistribution of wealth from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, without due regard to socioeconomic status.

Middle Class In Flames: All The Fed Has Done Is Help The Banks

Naked Capitalism supports Occupy Wall Street. Heh, heh. Does Jeep know?

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, here:

Oh, puhleeze. Robust recovery for who? The Fed not only threw staggering amounts of firepower at salvaging bank balance sheets, while showing no interest in rescuing ordinary Americans. It was also all-in on the Administration’s program to paper over the banks’ chain of title problems and their widespread servicing abuses, and didn’t bother to obtain any meaningful concessions or reforms, the most important of which would have been principal modifications, a remedy favored by investors as well as homeowners. The Fed has been all too happy to accept mission creep rather than speak up forcefully for the need for more fiscal stimulus.

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The analysis is right, but the prescriptions are left: raising the minimum wage, breaking mortgage contracts, and spending money we do not have. Oh, puhleeze. It's Naked Liberalism.

But she's great on Obama's Mussolini-style corporatism, most recently here in response to The New Republic:

I’m actually a bit miffed that Konczal treats the “corporatism” appellation as the sole property of the right wing (in the style sheet of the Vichy Left, calling them “hysterics” is redundant but necessary for the rubes), since I have a prior claim. And what is particularly rich is that Konczal apparently regards the allusion to Mussolini to be unfair . . ..

Obamacare IS corporatist. Here we have the industries that are significant contributors to why the American medical system is so overpriced – the health insurers and Big Pharma – actually playing a major role in writing the legislation. And how is it not a sop to large companies to have the government require that citizens buy your product or else pay large tax penalties? Mr. Market certainly thought so, for the price of health insurer and drug company stocks jumped the day the ACA passed. And remember, the beneficiaries of Obamacare extend beyond the insurers and pharmaceutical makers. Hospitals, who increasingly engage in oligopoly pricing (most surgeries need to be done in hospitals), also come out even stronger because new requirements imposed on doctors’ practices will make it difficult for a retiring MD who practices medicine, as opposed to servicing the rich (e.g., cosmetic surgeons) to sell their business to anyone other than a hospital.

And the label fits in the banking arena like a glove. I’ve ... called both the Bush, but far more often the Obama bank-friendly policies “Mussolini-style corporatism” since 2008, and well before what [Mike] Konczal [of The New Republic] claims is the origin of this description, Tim Carney’s book Obamanomics, published November 30, 2009.

The Moneybags Behind The American Conservative Comes Out For Higher Minimum Wage In California!

Proving once again that the word conservative often has little to do with free markets, the moneybags behind The American Conservative until March of this year has seen Governor Jerry Brown's California minimum wage of $10 and raised him $2!

The New York Times reports here:

The Massachusetts State Senate approved a measure last week that would increase that state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour, far more than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum. Hoping to reduce low-wage workers’ dependence on government aid, a conservative billionaire in California, Ronald Unz, is backing a referendum to raise his state’s minimum wage to $12 — even more than the $10 minimum that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in September. And on Tuesday, officials in Washington State announced that voters in SeaTac, a Seattle suburb, had approved a referendum to establish a $15-an-hour minimum wage for the 6,500 workers at the international airport there. Also this week in Maryland, the Montgomery and Prince George’s county councils voted to raise the minimum to $11.50 an hour by 2017.

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Moonbeams everywhere.

The Part-Timing Of America Has Been Slowing Down, Not Speeding Up

The part-timing of workers was a much more severe phenomenon from the 1960s . . . when teenagers used to bag groceries, for example.

That was a good thing. We should have more of it, not less.

Is it a coincidence that as the minimum wage rises over time part-timing decreases?

!

How About A National Minimum Wage Of $4.34 As In Obama's American Samoa?

"The first attempt at establishing a national minimum wage came in 1933, when a $0.25 per hour standard was set as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act. However, in the 1935 court case Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495), the United States Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional, and the minimum wage was abolished."

So says the Wikipedia article on the minimum wage, here.

Adjusted for inflation according to the Consumer Price Index since 1933, the minimum wage in 2011 should have been just $4.34, not $7.25.

So if we should do anything, we should lower the minimum wage, not raise it to $9.00 as President Obama hypocritically calls for. I say hypocritically because President Obama already thinks the lower level around $4.00 is just fine for the residents of American Samoa, who by law make between just $2.68 and $4.69, which is where even now he aims to keep them:

On September 30, 2010, President Obama signed legislation that delays scheduled wage increases for 2010 and 2011. On July 26, 2012, President Obama signed S. 2009 into law, postponing the minimum wage increase for 2012, 2013, and 2014. Annual wage increases of $0.50 will recommence on September 30, 2015 and continue every three years until all rates have reached the federal minimum.

This is thought to be a favor to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former Democrat Speaker of the House, which keeps her business pals there (tuna canners) more profitable than they otherwise would be if they had to comply with the federal minimum wage legislation.

Claiming the mantle of the working poor is so much easier than actually vetoing a bill which keeps workers impoverished indefinitely. He didn't veto it but signed it, and the residents of American Samoa remain second class citizens as a result, under the first black president. There's a new massa in town, but it's the same old shit.