All fast-food employees, regardless of age, will see a $20 an hour minimum wage in California, while the federal minimum wage is between $4.25 and $7.25, depending on age and length of time working.
California fast-food chains are laying off workers, raising prices and deciding against opening new stores as the state implements a minimum wage that is more than 175 percent higher than that required by the federal government.
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California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law a measure that will require most fast-food workers to be paid a minimum $20 an hour.
The minimum-wage law is set to go into effect next year.
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The nonprofit Institute for Reforming Government (IRG) on Friday issued a comprehensive analysis of Democratic Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’s 2023-25 state budget and bemoaned the proposal’s likely impact on job creators and the middle class.
Evers’s spending plan totals $104 billion, $16 billion more than the budget on which the Badger State now operates. If enacted, the new proposal would be the first state budget exceeding $100 billion. It includes massive spending increases in such areas as public education, childcare assistance, “affordable housing” and broadband expansion. Republican lawmakers, who object to the extent of the spending hikes and the governor’s refusal to devote more of the state’s $7.1 billion surplus to tax cuts, promised last week to thoroughly rewrite the plan.
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A Washington legislator who served time behind bars contends it is time for the state to stop saving millions on the backs of inmates who are paid pennies for work in prison jobs.
“This is an evolution of slavery,” Rep. Tarra Simmons, D-Bremerton, told reporters. She is proposing that inmates be paid minimum wage when they work in the kitchen or produce furniture or other goods.
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Four states will have a $15-an-hour minimum wage by New Year’s Day, while 27 states are poised to raise the minimum wage in 2023.
Some states are enacting the wage change after Jan. 1, so by the end of 2023 there will be six states that are set to have minimum wages at or above $15 an hour. They are California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, and Washington, according to a report last week from the National Employment Law Project.
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Democratic legislators in California passed a bill on Monday that will create an unelected state-run board to impose minimum wage and working conditions standards on the state’s fast food restaurants.
The bill, known as A.B. 257, will establish a ten-member council, made up of state officials as well as worker and employer representatives, to set employees’ wages, hours and working conditions for California’s entire fast food industry. The bill stipulates that the council has the authority to issue health, safety and anti-discrimination regulations as well as set an industrywide minimum wage of up to $22 per hour, according to the bill’s text.
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The minimum wage is a sort of litmus test. And not only for economists. For social justice advocates, too.
Forget, for a moment, the economics of it. In essence, minimum wage legislation imposes compulsory unemployment on the poor, the unskilled, racial minorities, the young, the physically and even more so the mentally handicapped—the very people all men of good will most want to help. Before the advent of this law, the unemployment rate for white middle-aged people and black teens was just about the same. Now, the latter are unemployed at quadruple the rate of the former.
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A federal appeals court on Thursday halted a mandate from the Biden administration that required an hourly minimum wage of $15 for outdoor recreation companies operating on public land.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver granted an injunction in a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation against the Biden administration on behalf of outdoor recreational groups that have contracts with the U.S. government or operate on federal land.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration again Thursday, this time for requiring federal contractors to pay a $15 an hour minimum wage. It’s the 21st lawsuit the attorney general has filed against the administration. Joining him are the attorneys general from Louisiana and Mississippi.
“The president has no authority to overrule Congress, which has sole authority to set the minimum wage and which already rejected a minimum wage increase,” Paxton argues.
Their lawsuit follows one filed last December by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of outdoor adventure guides, Arkansas Valley Adventures (AVA), a licensed river outfitter regulated by the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife, and the Colorado River Outfitters Association (CROA). The CROA, a nonprofit trade association, represents more than 150 independent operators who primarily conduct business on federal lands using special use permits through Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management.
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