Last week, The Atlantic Magazine published an article calling California’s $20 fast food minimum wage “the job killer that wasn’t.” Except even the data they cite shows job losses, including the most recent data released for November 2024.
Despite widespread reports of layoffs and store closures, the article states:
“Since California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector has actually gained jobs and done so at a faster pace than much of the rest of the country.”
EPI pushed back, highlighting multiple government data sources unequivocally proving the opposite: California has lost fast food jobs since the $20 minimum wage law went into effect, and is unique from the rest of the United States.
- As has been widely reported by dozens of publications including the Wall Street Journal, restaurants began adapting to the $20 law months prior to its implementation. That’s why EPI and others have measured the jobs impact using several potential reference dates, and several different data sets.
- The article references seasonally adjusted monthly jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics – but chooses its own months of analysis to claim job gains.
- Yet even this data shows the opposite, with employment down by thousands of jobs since January, as well as since the implementation of the law in April.
- But more importantly, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages – the dataset that even UC Berkeley’s Michael Reich acknowledged is the “near universe” and gold standard of measure for a $20 minimum wage – shows crystal-clear negative employment consequences.
- Since the passage of AB 1228 in September 2023, California’s privately-owned fast food restaurants have lost -6,166 jobs (-1.1%) through June 2024 (the latest available data). Since April, the same dataset shows the state lost 4,256 jobs.
- Over the same period last year, prior to passage of AB 1228 (September 2022 through June 2023), California gained 17,528 private sector fast food jobs (+3.1%).
- California’s fast food job losses are unique to the state – total private sector fast food employment nationwide grew +1.6% over the same period (September 2023 through June 2024).
- California’s fast food employment decline (-1.1%) is steeper than statewide private employment decline (-0.3%) over this period.
- The state has also seen the worst fast food job growth rate since the Great Recession.
Despite The Atlantic’s misleading headline – the data have not changed. Indeed, the magazine’s editors seem to have realized that after the fact, adding several corrections to the article to correct misleading data and acknowledging in correspondence with EPI that other points were up for debate.
In fact, the gold standard dataset according to Governor Newsom-preferred and the Atlantic’s widely-cited UC Berkeley economists shows unequivocal job losses: since the $20 minimum wage law was passed in September 2023, since reports of restaurant layoffs and closures began in early 2024, and since it went into effect in April 2024.