Was Newsom trying to punish California’s fast-food counties with that wage hike, same as

It’s no secret that raising the minimum wage on one sector of the economy will ensure that that sector suffers from higher labor costs that will likely shutter some businesses and lead to layoffs.

Which brings us to California’s absurd hike in its minimum wage law for fast-food workers to $20 and hour, supposedly done by labor-union-influenced Sacramento pols, led by A.B 1228 sponsor Assemblymember Chris Holden of Pasadena to “benefit” workers the unions don’t actually represent. Holden, of course, is very unioned-up, with his top donors public and private-sector labor unions. He seems to do what they tell him.

According to The Hill:

Beginning Monday, most fast food workers in California will be paid at least $20 per hour, marking one of the highest minimum wages in the country.

A law increasing the minimum wage, signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last September, followed a push from the state’s fast food workers and labor unions, which held various strikes calling for better working conditions and wages.

The $20 an hour minimum wage, which should have a knock-on effect to fast food workers with more seniority and higher wages, is said to be just the start. An Orwellian-sounding fast-food panel will be empowered to raise the minimum wage even more every year, no matter how battered businesses may be.

The law also creates a fast food council that is able to increase that wage each year through 2029 by 3.5 percent or the change in averages for the U.S. Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners and clerical workers — whichever is lower.

Now sales are dropping already based on rising prices, these from Bidenflation, Reuters reports, and certainly more from wage-connected rising prices, and layoffs and business closures are expected to follow. With fast food industries spending about 20% of their costs on labor, prices are forecast to rise between 5% and 15% on most fast food items and consumers will turn to food trucks and illegal alien street operations as an alternative if they can afford anything at all.

Obviously, this is punitive — to someone out there, and not just the workers who will be laid off.

So where are all the fast-food establishments in California concentrated? There are some 38,000 of them, and most are in what is billed as the birthplace and world capital of fast food, Southern California.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

The state has more than 540,000 fast-food workers, about 195,000 of them in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to the latest May 2022 figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Add in San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Imperial counties and it’s a lot more than 195,000 such workers from the 540,000 total. All of them are fast food-establishment loaded. California has about 39 million people, with about 17.5 million concentrated in Southern California.

The Los Angeles Times tried to hazard a few guesses as to why the area was so fast-food oriented, blaming the automobile, but data like these suggest that they were a bit off — there are lots of states that have wide open land and not much fast food. This is simply a SoCal phenomenon.

What are some of those communities going to look like once the fast-food establishments are gone? What will all of the offramp towns in Orange, Riverside, greater Los Angeles and San Diego counties along the 5 or 15 look like without their thousands of fast-food establishments? Like it or not, this is what these cities look like. One gargantuan boulevard leading from the highway to the beach at Huntington Beach called Beach Boulevard is a positive promenade of fast food establishments, I remember it vividly going through there. This shareable Google Maps map gives a hint of what it is like, and there are quite a few more unpinned establishments on that boulevard.

Fast-food establishments positively identify these areas. A very useful group of charts, albeit a decade old, from scholar David Yager at American River College, shows the density of fast food establishments in SoCal.

Huntington Beach absolutely, is one of them, but also Buena Park, Fullerton, Riverside, Corona, Montebello, Pomona, Azusa, Costa Mesa, Aliso Viejo, Diamond Bar, Irvine, Cypress — what would some of them be without their fast food establishment signs dotting the highway in immense numbers? These establishments dominate these places. I shudder when I think of Riverside which was hit so hard by the 2008 mortgage-backed crisis and now this. Riverside is not a nasty place, yet somehow it never gets any breaks.

According to the Associated Press last September, the bad law came about as a result of a political tradeoff:

It also settles — for now, at least — a fight between labor and business groups over how to regulate the industry. In exchange for higher pay, labor unions have dropped their attempt to make fast food corporations liable for the misdeeds of their independent franchise operators in California, an action that could have upended the business model on which the industry is based. The industry, meanwhile, has agreed to pull a referendum related to worker wages off the 2024 ballot.

But there’s something more to this war on fast food — it’s redolent of Newsom and his ilk, with their urge to punish the more conservative and questioning parts of Southern California.

Remember the arbitrary beach lockdowns during the time of COVID, one beach getting closed, another beach getting not closed, nobody in danger from COVID on the beach of course, but some beaches were more equal than others? I wrote about that bizarre bid to punish, but technical issues won’t let me retrieve the links. It came at a time when police where hunting surfers down in the water for surfing, and skate parks were being filled with sand, all of which happened in the rebellious beach communities, some of which protested vigorously against the unreasonable lockdown rulings. It’s funny how these communities correspond so well with the places that have a lot of fast food establishments, most of which are run by independent entrepreneurs in franchises. The beach closures were believed by Orange County locals to have been done specifically to harm businesses in places with red-voting tendencies. Deep blue La Jolla, on the other hand, with beaches just as crowded, skated from such prohibitions.

Now we see the same communities targeted with this fast food dynamic. What kind of state punishes certain sectors of its own economy harming its own tax base for political purposes other than a tyrannical one-party state government? That’s one thing we can see with this outrageous Newsom move to please his union buddies, and with it, take down Southern California in particular for not being the good blue-city soldiers they’ve come to expect of all California’s cities. The other thing we can see is that the unions expect to clean up with fewer fast food establishments to organize, taking advantage of the fact that workers who are not laid off will be inevitably overworked as their colleagues are laid off and easier to shoehorn into unions.

It’s disgusting — and the disparate impact ought to be the basis for challenging this economy-killing law.

Image: Google Maps // shareable, fair use