Free Republic

When arguing against a given minimum wage (e.g., $15/hour), late radio giant Rush Limbaugh would sometimes rhetorically ask: Why stop there? If that amount is good, wouldn’t a $50 minimum wage be even better? It’s unknown whether Limbaugh would’ve even suspected that a statist would make his “illustrating absurdity by being absurd” example a serious proposal within 10 years, but here we are: Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who’s running for the Golden State’s open Senate seat, made this very proposal in a Monday night debate with her rivals. “Just do the math!” she exclaimed, alluding to the supposed self-evident legitimacy...

A Southern California fast food franchise owner is the latest to signal that menu prices will go up when the minimum wage for all fast food employees climbs to $20 an hour in April under a new California law. Marcus Walberg, whose family operates four Fatburger restaurants in Los Angeles, recently told Business Insider that he sees no option but to raise prices and make other changes to adapt. “It’s a scary thing because customers are already complaining that prices are too high,” Walberg told the business news outlet.

Moonstone Bistro, a popular fine-dining restaurant in west Redding, has announced they will stop serving lunch, citing California’s increased minimum wage requirements as a critical factor. Starting in April, California fast-food chains, with more than 60 locations nationwide, will be required to pay their employees $20/hour. Across the state, minimum wage continues to climb and now sits at $16/hour. Moonstone Bistro won’t have to follow that first law, but they do expect its ramifications to be felt.

According to an analysis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the minimum wage does not suffice to pay for a typical set of living expenses in any state of the United States.Hawaii, Georgia and Utah, where the living wage gap exceeded $10 per hour, fared the worst.While Georgia and Utah only apply the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, Hawaii has a substantially higher minimum wage of $12 - once more to be increased to $14 on Jan. 1, 2024. Yet, the extremely high living costs on the inland group have created the highest living wage gap in all...

Minimum-wage workers in 22 states are going to see more money in their paychecks in the new year. Those increases will affect an estimated 9.9 million workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which estimates that those bumped wages will add up to an additional $6.95 billion in pay.

Pizza Hut franchises across California announced that they will be laying off 1200 delivery drivers due to the new minimum wage for fast food employees, which is set to take effect in 2024. The minimum wage hike was an initiative of Governor Gavin Newsom. LA List noted that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1228 on Sept. 28, which boosts the average hourly wage for more than 500,000 California fast food workers in April 2024. “That’s a romanticized version of a world that doesn’t exist,” Newsom said at the bill-signing event, according to the Associated Press. “We have the opportunity to...

Imagine if you will, a world in which businesses exist to make a profit, and free people consent to labor for these businesses in exchange for pay, and then a government comes in and legislates that these businesses pay their new employees a price they cannot (or do not want to) afford, so they eliminate the positions, fire the workers, and remove a service to paying customers they once provided—and certain people (read, average Democrat voters) still can’t figure out what factor in the equation caused the whole mess.

Multiple Pizza Hut operators throughout California announced on Tuesday that they would be laying off hundreds of drivers before the new state minimum fast food wage of $20/an hour comes into effect on April 1st. The new law, Assembly Bill 1228, has been one of the most contentious of the year. Originally, the bill would have raised the minimum to $22 an hour and hold franchise corporations accountable for labor law violations at individual locations. In addition, thanks to a new Fast Food Council created from a new law signed last year (AB 257), benefits like paid leave and predictive...

A new year will bring more pay for millions of Americans, according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). On New Years Day, 22 states will raise their minimum wage, giving nearly 9.9 million Americans a pay raise. In total, workers will receive $6.95 billion in additional wages from the increases. In addition, 38 cities and counties will increase their minimum wages on January 1, rising above their state floors and adding to the number of workers who will see any increase in their paychecks.

Multiple Pizza Hut franchises in California are planning to lay off delivery drivers as the restaurant chain braces for an increase in the minimum wage for fast food workers next year. Several Pizza Hut operators filed notices to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act saying they were discontinuing their delivery services. “PacPizza, LLC, operating as Pizza Hut, has made a business decision to eliminate first-party delivery services and, as a result, the elimination of all delivery driver positions,” a federal WARN Act notice filed by the fast-food operator with the state’s Employment Development Department said, Business Insider...

Story by nluna@insider.com (Nancy Luna) • 5h Two Pizza Hut operators in California are eliminating their in-house delivery services at hundreds of stores, resulting in more than 1,200 driver layoffs, according to federal employment notices reviewed by Business Insider. The layoffs, effective throughout February, affect Pizza Hut delivery drivers across California, including at Sacramento, Palm Springs, and Los Angeles locations. The Pizza Hut franchisees are reducing staff as fast-food chains in the state brace for a new law that increases worker pay to $20 an hour in April. "PacPizza, LLC, operating as Pizza Hut, has made a business decision to...

Twenty-two states are set to increase their minimum wages at the start of 2024. Come January 1, nine states as well as DC will have minimum wages of at least $15, according to an analysis by DailyMail.com. Washington State will introduce a minimum wage of $16.28 an hour, making it the nation's highest. Next is California which will have a minimum wage of $16.00 an hour. There is no state minimum wage law in five Southern states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Tennessee. In those states minimum wages therefore default to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour -...

One branch in Darien, Conn., charged as much as $18 for a Big Mac combo meal, which includes medium fries and a medium soft drink. Meanwhile, that same Big Mac combo will run hungry patrons $13.69 at a McDonald’s in Times Square. Shares of McDonald’s closed up 1.7% to $260.15. Net income rose to $2.3 billion, up from $1.98 billion in the same period last year, and same-store sales in the US increased by 8.1%, again attributed to price hikes. During an earnings call with investors, CFO Ian Borden confirmed that the company’s US prices did increase in the third...

Political Satire: Having trouble surviving these times? You’re not alone. Join us in columnist John F. Di Leo’s exploration of an alternate universe, where we imagine the impossible: Joe Buckstop, an aging, corrupt old fool, somehow becomes president in his basement, and every night, an aide has to bring him his soup and discuss the events of the day as he prepares to receive his nightly meds… Dateline, February 8. Begin Transcript: “Good evening, boss! Guess what we have for you tonight!” “Well, it had better be soup…” “Of course it’s soup, sir, but it’s one of my favorites… country...

This isn't exactly the machine uprising we were expecting.Chipotle’s social media accounts can be on the nose sometimes, with memes about sweater- and spooky- seasons, respectively; with rhetorical graphics about how a burrito would wear its pants; and with an oddly terrifying corncob-human hybrid called “Corn Lad.” But earlier this week, @Chipotle went serious on Instagram, providing a preview of Hyphen, its “collaborative robot” (or cobot), which it said was currently being tested to make burrito bowls and salads beside its fully human coworkers. “Around 65% of Chipotle’s digital orders consist of bowls or salads, so with Hyphen on board,...

Washington state’s minimum wage will increase 54 cents to $16.28 an hour next year. The Washington Department of Labor and Industries made the announcement Friday, The Seattle Times reported. A full-time worker making that wage would earn nearly $34,000 per year. The 3.37% increase is a cost-of-living adjustment based on the federal Consumer Price Index. Washington’s minimum wage of $15.74 an hour is currently the highest state-level minimum wage in the nation, according to state labor officials. …

In the face of recent intense pressures on fast-food workers, employees in the sector in California are about to get a boost with the creation of a body that will set wages and other standards for the industry. The move is a hard-fought win for the labor movement in the state and is expected to be signed into law – called the Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act – by Gavin Newsom, the California governor, later on Thursday. It comes after a tumultuous period. Fast-food workers in California have held over 450 strikes since 2020, according to the labor...

The California legislature just passed a new bill to require all major fast-food chains throughout the state to pay their employees at least $20 per hour – and McDonald's, the world's largest fast-food chain with 40,100 stores worldwide, is really angry about it. The passage of Assembly Bill 1228, which is now on its way to Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk, "will result in a devastating financial blow to California McDonald's franchises at a projected annual cost of $250,000 per McDonald's restaurant," responded the National Owners Association to the bill's passage. According to the legislators behind AB 1228, the bill only...

Big tech’s lobbying arm and the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations are cheering on President Joe Biden’s amnesty plan that would pack the United States labor market with more foreign visa workers for business to hire over American graduates and professionals. This week, Biden’s amnesty plan was introduced in Congress by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as Democrats look to increase foreign competition in the U.S. workforce while more than 17 million Americans are jobless. Among other things, the plan would: Put nearly all illegal aliens in the U.S. on an eight-year path to citizenship Provide $4 billion in...

Maximum Facts About the Minimum WageAt 2:00 AM on Saturday, February 27, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a “COVID relief and economic support“ bill at a cost to taxpayers of $1.9 trillion. The next Saturday, Senate Democrats passed a very similar bill, and President Biden stated he will sign it. This will be the sixth “COVID relief” law and swell the tab for such legislation to a total of $5.3 trillion. The combined cost of these laws to every household in the United States will be an average of $41,036.The House bill also contained a...