Why Is Panera Exempted from California's New Minimum Wage Law?
reason.com
reason.com
Lovely. Don't look into it, it's how the sausage made, or rather, how the bread is baked. It's complicated and you wouldn't understand it.
> One might also wonder if McDonald's and Burger King will suddenly get into the bakery business.
Why stop there. Fresh bread at oil change places, at hardware stores, gas stations. Apple and Google will start selling fresh bread. Meanwhile Newsom will probably buy wheat and flour futures for the next few years.
> Panera Bread is poised to get a boost from a bizarre clause in the fast-food minimum wage law that exempts "chains that bake bread and sell it as a standalone item
Expect to see lots more franchises offering standalone baked bread...
"We sell exactly one loaf of baked bread per day. And it's a micro loaf. So one person per day gets a mini muffin sized loaf. Oh, weird! No we can ignore the law."
I absolutely love this. But of course I believe any minimum wage policies are terrible.
Any? You barely have to peruse a history book to see countless examples of exploitative labor processes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carriesheffield/2014/04/29/on-t...
However the point is exactly why it is bad policy. At any minimum wage, the government has structurally unemployed anyone that can't provide value at or greater than the minimum wage. It's basic economics.
If that's all it takes to avoid paying minimum wage?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-ru...
I'm actually shocked that Subway bread is ~10% sugar. Because it's not like it tastes sweet. It just tastes like bread. Not great bread, don't get me wrong. But I would have thought that a 10-to-1 flour-to-sugar ratio would be very, very noticeably sweet. But I don't bake bread so I guess I just don't know these things.
How is a new bakery supposed to compete if the old bakeries have a competitive advantage due to being grandfathered out of regulation that raises their costs?
How will the old bakery keep its employees if the new bakery pays more ?
In other words, lawmakers shouldn't be allowed to pass whatever law they want. Rather, as part of the law, they would be required to explain the underlying need to justify the law, why that need is legitimate, and why this particular law is the best solution to satisfy the need. And if those didn't pass a minimal level of muster, then its gets struck down.
Because the idea that minimum wage would be exempt for "chains that bake bread and sell it as a standalone item" is just something that it's impossible to think of any reasonable justification for, unless there were some kind of emergency nationwide shortage of bread or something -- which is not the case here.
Generally speaking I'm not even a big fan of judicial review as a concept, since it does seem to involve a somewhat anti-democratic element of appointed judges overriding elected representatives. But at the same time, I do think that legislation needs to have a basic level of justification and coherency -- and the governor getting legislators to insert an exemption for his buddy seems even more anti-democratic.
But in practice, a legislative body may or may not deliberate. And that deliberation may or may not include reasons for some of the parts of the legislation. (And it virtually never includes deliberation on a small clause like this.)
But at the end of the day, nothing has to be deliberated on. It's just a majority vote at the end of the day.
Many of these small clause discussions go on around amendments.
There is less deliberation on policies (rules) and regulations (how an agency decides to implement a passed law). There is deliberation of course but it is more opaque to the public and less record is made.
Whether it’s easy to do effectively by the public is another thing.
This is usually the preamble. When a law is weighed in court, moreover, lawmakers’ statements are often referenced to gauge intent.
In this case, California works in a better way. A court paused the law after popular outcry was mobilised into a petition campaign [1]. The law is on hold until a popular referendum on it concludes [2].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-30/judge-puts...
[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/25/fast-food-workers-rig...
And some people said we didn't need em.
I'm a long time resident of California, and a strident lefty. Which is to say (in contradiction to the vacuous BS most everyone east of AZ believes about CA) that the democratic party is a totally corrupt organmization that is not in the very least left leaning.
High on the virtue posturing, low on actual benfitts to working people. Not as bad as the wing-nut south of course, but certainly not focused on helping the working class.
The 2nd most corrupt political party in the US is the DNC, right behind the RNC.
Anyone who thinks either of those organizations is meant to serve anyone but the wealthy is just in denial or not paying attention.
It's sad to see how far into identity politics the US has fallen, and this is the exact same phenomenon with the RNC wing-nuts as it is for the DNC woke-nuts.
Binding oneself to an identity, immediately disconnects one from the specific details in which they are embroiled. It overrides reality with ideals.
Newsom in particular is a major source of frustration for actual leftys. He's also a demonstration that governors in California only come from 2 families 8-/
I wonder how successful Subway will be when they inevitably claim that they were selling bread before Sept 15th. I've never done it, but I'm 100% confident you can buy the bread they make... you just might have to pay for a veggie sub without the veggies.
> there's a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. A far better way to help them would be to subsidize their wages or - better yet - help them acquire the skills needed to earn more on their own.
In the end: IDK but it doesn’t seem like the best issue to focus on to help people.
35hr x $7 = 245, x4 weeks = $980
35hr x $15 = 525, x4 weeks = $2100
At my poorest (and with 3 dependents) EBT only ever paid out $~650 a month. The gross delta here is $1120. So the state should come out ahead.
But all I've heard of is hours being cut in line with wage increases. So few workers are pulling that $2100 and are presumably still on benefits.
It's particularly gross that so many states have a minimum wage of a little over $7 in 2024. That's ~$14k before taxes at 40 hours a week.
I think that’s a liveable wage in some parts of farm country. Not great. But better than being undercut by illegal labour. (At least, that’s the argument one would have to disprove. I’m generally in favour of a $25/hour minimum wage.)
Even longer than you think, since 1987 was 37 years ago.
Unskilled labor simply isn't worth very much most of the time, but it's nice to help people get their foot in the door. One of my absolute favorite outcomes for an employee is to have them grow in capacity so that I "have" to pay them way much more than some artificial wage floor because they've developed into a solid contributor.
The job of a governor is NOT to take bribes in exchange for exclusions in a law. Government is meant to be a check on business that represents the common interest, so the fault lies squarely in that department.
I live in CA. I blame everyone down the chain. Most people I know say the same thing. Its not one person or entity. Its the entire chain that allows this to happen including the legislature, business owners that are lobbying, the governor that is signing these bill, but most of all the citizens voting in CA. We voted for this. IMO we are the one entity the most to blame.
Until we, the voters, step up and take responsibility for our actions nothing is going to get fixed. After all why would the business owners, legislators, or governor be expected to take responsibility when everyone who votes in the state gets to pass the buck?
That's how you get articles like this: "this Big Government law is poorly written", and "the government shouldn't interfere with someone's negotiated pay rate" are quite compatible.
(NB: I'm not speaking for or against either of those stances here, just describing what I suspect would be Reason's rationale.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(magazine)
> Reason is an American libertarian monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation, with the tagline "Free Minds and Free Markets".
You pick on a legitimate issue and discreetly add something that pushes your agenda.