Ingrid Vilorio, a cook at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Hayward, California, is getting a raise this week, courtesy of a state law that took effect Monday boosting the wages of fast-food workers in the state to a minimum of $20 an hour. The extra money, she told me, would not go for luxuries. It would, instead, be used for groceries to feed her 9-year-old son.
The only way to pay the bill for better fast-food wages, they proclaim, is to raise prices and cut workers’ hours and jobs. But there’s lots that gets jettisoned when this story is told. For starters, California’s been raising its minimum wage for the better part of a decade. Over that period of time, Koonse said, 'fast food has actually gained employment.' She said, 'California has added 142,000 jobs to the fast food industry since minimum wage started going up in 2015.