The leftists’ “Fight for 15” actually resulted in 20 in one case, and because of that so-called success, hundreds of working-class employees in California will soon be earning zero.
Two major Pizza Hut operations, with restaurants in the Los Angeles area, recently announced they would prefer to dump staff than pay them $20 an hour to comply with a new state law.
Consequently, this Christmas, an estimated 1,200 Pizza Hut delivery drivers received a notice to visit the unemployment line.
According to The Blaze, California’s Department of Industrial Relations announced in September that the state’s minimum wage was set to rise from $15.50 an hour to $16.
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Within days of that announcement, left-wing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that boosted the minimum wage to $20 an hour for fast-food workers. The increase kicks in during April.
“California is home to more than 500,000 fast-food workers who – for decades – have been fighting for higher wages and better working conditions,” Newsom said in a statement. “Today, we take one step closer to fairer wages, safer and healthier working conditions, and better training by giving hardworking fast-food workers a stronger voice and seat at the table.”
Those 1,200 former drivers may disagree with Newsom’s assessment.
As columnist Eric Boehm of the libertarian Reason magazine noted, they just discovered that the maxim of conservative economist Thomas Sowell is that the real minimum wage is zero.
“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force,” Sowell noted in his book “Basic Economics.”
Yet, it’s not just the workers who pay. The Blaze noted that pizza lovers in LA will now pay more because they will have to rely on delivery services such as DoorDash, which has heftier fees than what Pizza Hut would charge for delivery.
Read: Here’s How Newsom’s California Is Killing The American Auto Industry
Aside from Pizza Hut’s layoffs, McDonald’s and Chipotle have announced they will raise menu prices to compensate for the minimum-wage hike.
In November 2022, the leftist publication The Guardian celebrated the 10th anniversary of the “Fight for 15” labor movement, which sought to push the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than double its rate.
The push failed on the federal level, but succeeded in many blue states, such as California.
In that article, Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the City University of New York, told The Guardian, “The Fight for $15 has lifted up the whole issue of the pathetic state of the minimum wage. In terms of pushing the envelope to make the utopian real, it was extremely successful, at least in blue cities and states.”
Unless, it seems, you are a Pizza Hut delivery driver in Los Angeles.
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