December 13, 2024

Breaking Down Newsom’s Timeline of Embarrassment on CA Fast Food Job Losses

It’s been a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad week for California Governor Gavin Newsom. After hanging his hat on the $20 minimum wage being a “good” thing for his state, EPI and local news outlets slammed him for lies about job losses as…
December 6, 2024

New Employer Data Provides Further Evidence of Newsom’s Minimum Wage Failures

There are a lot of numbers swirling around describing the impact of Governor Gavin Newsom’s $20 fast food minimum wage law in California. On one hand, the Governor is claiming there haven’t been any job losses (in fact citing preliminary data not adjusted for seasonal hiring factors to say there…
November 27, 2024

New Data Shows Restaurant Workers Are Earning $18/Hr Or More Nationwide

Point of sale platform Square releases new data quarterly on earnings and tips for workers across the country – and the latest results show restaurant workers are earning substantial tips and well above minimum wages across the country. Square finds that the median restaurant employee is earning a $14.20…
November 22, 2024

CA Rejects Statewide Wage Hike For the First Time in State Ballot Measure History

After weeks of vote counting across the Golden State, the Associated Press finally called the race for Proposition 32 – which would raise the state’s minimum wage from $16 to $18 an hour. The measure was rejected by a 50.8% to 49.2% vote as of November 22. This is…
November 15, 2024

Since Chicago’s July Wage Hikes, Hospitality Jobs Plummet

After the city council passed an ordinance to eliminate Chicago’s tip credit last year, the city experienced a one-two punch of wage hikes this summer. As a result, the number of jobs in the Chicago area’s leisure and hospitality sector plummeted – slashing 6,000 jobs as of September 2024.
November 8, 2024

A Closer Study Proves CA’s $20 Minimum Wage is Costing Jobs, Raising Prices in Fast Food

One surprising takeaway from this election is California’s statewide $18 minimum wage ballot measure currently trailing by roughly 4 percentage points. While the measure qualified for the ballot several years ago after it failed to certify for the 2022 midterms, California’s recent experiments with unprecedented minimum wage hikes —…
November 1, 2024

One Fair Wage Ends Up Uniting MA Against Tip Credit Elimination

One Fair Wage set out across the country this year to try to eliminate state and local tip credits in Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island. The group’s only measure to survive the legislative and ballot initiative process was Question 5 in Massachusetts, which aims…
October 25, 2024

One Fair Wage Could Be In Hot Water (Again) With the IRS

In February, U.S. House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer opened an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)’s enforcement (or lack thereof) of non-profit tax laws against progressive activist groups, including anti-tip credit group One Fair Wage (OFW). Once the investigation went public, National Review reports One…
October 18, 2024

Busting UC Berkeley Myths about California’s Fast Food Employment

A report recently released by researchers at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), a union-funded project housed at the University of California-Berkeley, echoes Governor Gavin Newsom’s media campaign that the recent $20 fast food minimum wage has not been a disaster. Yet Californians for months leading up…
October 11, 2024

“Maximum Deception” Is Afoot on California’s $20 Minimum Wage

This week, advocates for Governor Gavin Newsom’s $20 fast food minimum wage are coming out in droves – clawing at alternative data sources to prove Newsom is right and restaurant operators are wrong about the impacts of the wage law. The two studies that surfaced over the last two weeks,…