California Fast Food Workers Will Now Make $20 an Hour

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill Thursday raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers in the state to $20 an hour.

The law, which will go into effect next year, follows California's nation-leading minimum wage rate of $15.50 an hour, according to data from the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.

California fast-food workers make an estimated  $16.60 per hour, just over $34,000 a year, which is below the California Poverty Measure for a family of four, according to calculations by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Equality. The poverty level accounts for housing costs and publicly-funded benefits.

Enrique Lopezlira, director of the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center’s Low Wage Work Program, told The AP that most fast-food workers in California are over 18 and the sole providers for their families. 

“This is for my ancestors. This is for all the farm works, all the cotton-pickers. This is for them. We ride on their shoulders,” Anneisha Williams, who works at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Southern California, said at the signing ceremony. 

The governor’s signature settles a long-lasting debate between labor unions and fast-food corporations. In exchange for higher pay, unions dropped their request to make fast-food restaurants liable for infringements caused by franchise operators in California.

If labor unions had been successful in overturning this standard, it would have altered the entire fast food industry’s business model, according to The Associated Press. 

Newsom’s new law will take effect April 1. It applies only to restaurant employees that work in franchises with at least 60 locations. Oddly, restaurants that make and sell their own bread, like Panera, are the exception. 

The law states that the fast food council has the capacity to increase the $20 per hour wage each year through 2029 by 3.5%, or the difference in averages for the U.S. Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners and clerical workers. If they decide to utilize these powers, they must do the one that yields the lower cost.