Newsom’s $20 Minimum Wage Has Nuked 20,000 Fast-Food Jobs, Devastating Workers and Small Businesses

By The Blogging Hounds California Governor Gavin Newsom promised a utopia for low-wage workers when he signed the FAST Recovery Act, hiking the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour. Two years later, the results are catastrophic: nearly 20,000 fast-food jobs have vanished, the largest share of any state in the nation, leaving…

By The Blogging Hounds

California Governor Gavin Newsom promised a utopia for low-wage workers when he signed the FAST Recovery Act, hiking the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour. Two years later, the results are catastrophic: nearly 20,000 fast-food jobs have vanished, the largest share of any state in the nation, leaving families scrambling and small businesses shuttered.

The True Cost of Virtue Signaling

The Employment Policies Institute reports that this spike in wages has backfired spectacularly. Pizza Hut franchises cut 1,200 delivery drivers, Mod Pizza and Foster’s Freeze closed stores, and thousands of workers are now unemployed. “Newsom’s $20 wage has turned out to be nothing more than a boost to his own ego at the expense of fast-food workers,” Rebekah Paxton of EPI told the Washington Examiner.

For those still employed, the “benefits” are hollow. Workers lost an average of 250 hours annually—equivalent to $4,000 less in income under the old wage. Families are suffering not from low pay, but from lost opportunity. The law promised living wages, but delivered reduced hours, fewer jobs, and shattered small businesses.

Small Businesses Bear the Brunt

Unlike multinational chains, small businesses can’t absorb skyrocketing labor costs. The American Cornerstone Institute warns that Newsom’s law exacerbates consolidation, pushing local restaurants and franchisees under while enriching the largest corporations. California’s one-size-fits-all wage ignores regional cost-of-living differences. San Francisco’s labor market is not the same as rural Northern California, yet both face identical mandates, distorting local economies and punishing the very communities the law claimed to help.

A Political Photo Op Masquerading as Policy

This law was never about workers. It was central planning disguised as compassion, a political stunt wrapped in virtue signaling. Conservatives warned that these economic distortions would destroy jobs—and history now confirms it.

Every shuttered restaurant, every laid-off worker, and every reduced paycheck is a direct consequence of Newsom’s ambition overriding economic reality. Families who trusted the promise of prosperity now face an uncertain future, all for the sake of a governor’s political optics.

The Bottom Line

California’s experiment with a $20 fast-food wage is a cautionary tale for the nation. Good intentions are not a substitute for sound economics, and top-down mandates can devastate the very people they claim to help. Newsom’s law proves that when ideology trumps practicality, jobs vanish, hours shrink, and small businesses die—while the political elite celebrate their own “progressive victories.”

The human cost of central planning is real, and in California, the aftermath is clear: 20,000 lost jobs, thousands of families hurt, and a warning to every state tempted by wage utopianism.

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