For Immediate Release: January 30, 2025
Contact: Molly Weedn, molly@weednpa.com
Sacramento – More than 1,000 local restaurant owners want Governor Newsom and the Fast Food Council to hear them loud and clear: continuing to mandate wage increases will have devastating consequences for California restaurants.
Their urgent plea comes as the Fast Food Council is being asked to consider yet another wage increase in the coming weeks, less than a year after the $20/hr went into effect last April.
In the letter sent to Governor Newsom and the Fast Food Council on Wednesday, local restaurant owners wrote to express their “strong opposition to any further wage increases by the Fast Food Council in 2025. In short, an additional wage increase would once again unfairly single out our livelihoods and cripple thousands of small business owners like us who are already struggling to survive.”
Hundreds of local restaurant owners have signed the letter in recent weeks, as proponents of another wage hike recently asked the Fast Food Council to consider the issue for their next meeting.
Recent data released by Datassential shows that food prices at California limited-service restaurants have dramatically risen by 13.1 percent since September 2023, when legislation increasing the state’s minimum wage for fast food workers to $20/hour was signed. California vastly outpaces menu price increases in the rest of the nation.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, California’s quick-service restaurants lost more than 6,166 jobs between September 2023, when the legislation was signed, and June 2024 (latest available data). During the same period the year before, the state added 17,528 fast food jobs.
“The $20/hour minimum wage is projected to cost local restaurant owners as much as $250,000 per restaurant, per year. We simply cannot survive another wage increase,” the letter to Governor Newsom and the Fast Food Council read.
In a July 2024 survey of local restaurant owners impacted by the $20 per hour minimum wage law:
- 98% reported raising food prices
- 89% reported reducing employee hours
- 74% reported an increased likelihood of shutting down their restaurants
- 70% reported reducing staff or consolidating positions as a result of the $20 per hour minimum wage law.