The prospect of a $20 minimum wage for California fast-food workers has restaurants scrambling to absorb the impact of what’s expected to be an elevation of the whole industry’s pay scale there.
It’s a preview of what the entire U.S. business would face if a hike of that magnitude is exported nationwide, as several well-known California politicians are now vowing to do if elected to federal office.
Indeed, several candidates for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat have pledged not to stop with a $20 minimum wage across all 50 states. Barbera Lee, currently California’s U.S. congresswoman representing Oakland, is campaigning on the promise to seek a federal minimum of $50 an hour.
Pressed during a debate Monday night on the feasibility of a wage that’s seven times the current federal minimum, Lee countered that it’s a matter of need for some residents of the state she hopes to represent in the Senate.
“In the Bay Area, $127,000 [in annual income] for a family of four is just barely enough to get by,” Lee said. Elsewhere in the state, a household income of $100,000 wouldn’t cut it, either, according to the congresswoman.
Lee said she had no choice but to pursue minimum wages of that scale because of California’s high cost of living. All of the candidates noted that housing costs in particular have been soaring within the state.
Her two fellow Democrats on the stage Monday night, U.S. Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter, have called for raising the federal minimum to between $20 and $25 an hour. A wage in that range would exceed what’s heretofore been the most audacious hike proposal aired on Capitol Hill, Bernie Sanders’ call for $17 an hour and a dissolution of the tip credit.
The one public figure from New York’s Cuomo family who proved not to be a lout, the late former Gov. Mario Cuomo, famously quipped that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Even if Lee, Schiff or Porter should win the election to fill the Senate seat left by the death of Dianne Feinstein, they’d still have to convince just about every fellow Democrat in the upper chamber to vote yea on a $50 minimum wage. It’s a tall order.
And what sort of federal wage hike would Republican aspirants for the seat like to see the Senate hammer through?
There was only one on stage Monday with Lee, Schiff and Porter: Former Los Angeles Dodgers star Steve Garvey. The moderator of the debate asked the one-time first baseman how much of an increase he’d seek in the minimum wage.
“The minimum wage is where it should be,” Garvey responded, though it wasn’t clear if he was referring to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour or California’s rate as of Jan. 1 of $16.
In an earlier debate with the same lineup as Monday’s event, Garvey contended that another wage hike would fuel inflation, leaving California residents with less disposable income, not more.
Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial in the Senate of Donald Trump, is currently leading the pack of aspirants for the California seat, followed by Garvey, Porter and Lee, in that order.
Laphonza Butler, a former president of Service Employees International Union’s California operation, is serving as Feinstein’s successor until the general election in November 2024. During her 12 years of leading the union, Butler was instrumental in pushing labor’s pipedream of a $15 minimum wage into a reality within the state.