Most fast food workers in California will be paid at least $20 an hour beginning Monday when a new law is scheduled to kick in giving more financial security to an historically low-paying profession while threatening to raise prices in a state already known for its high cost of living.
Democrats in the state Legislature passed the law last year in part as an acknowledgement that many of the more than 500,000 people who work in fast food restaurants are not teenagers earning some spending money, but adults working to support their families.
That includes immigrants like Ingrid Vilorio, who said she started working at a McDonald’s shortly after arriving in the United States in 2019. Fast food was her full-time job until last year. Now, she works about eight hours per week at a Jack in the Box while working other jobs.
“The $20 raise is great. I wish this would have come sooner,” Vilorio said through a translator. “Because I would not have been looking for so many other jobs in different places.”
The way I see it is they have to start somewhere. Just getting to this point was a fight now imagine tackling the entire work industry all at once. This way at least other buisness can be faced with either paying their people more or lose them to fast food. It gives a fighting chance when negotiating a pay raise for a lot of people.
I know it isn’t much and there is so much more fighting to be had but for now we gotta take the little victories while still moving forward otherwise we get bogged down with the all or nothing mentality.