> Asked directly about the bakery exemption at a press conference last year, Newsom said it was "part of the sausage making" of the legislative process.
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.
Slightly misleading title. The exemption is not granted to Panera specifically.
> 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...
Ideally, any law specifying an exception whose conditions had to hold in the past should list all known qualifying entities if they number less than a dozen.
I think any law that includes grandfathering like this should also include a sunset date on that grandfathering.
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?
Subway in Ireland lost a court case about VAT because the bread they sell is not bread but cake because of the high sugar content. Bread is VAT exempt because it is a staple food while cake is not.
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.
Most of the bread I have had when visiting the US tasted sweet to me. Even my children (brought up in Norway and aged then between 5 and 15) complained that everything was too sweet.
Oh wow -- OK, so then it's pretty easy to imagine that suddenly McDonald's, Taco Bell, Starbucks -- they all start installing little miniature baking ovens in the corner and adding a "fresh-baked bread roll" at the very bottom of the menu.
If that's all it takes to avoid paying minimum wage?
When I was in college, the city where my university was located had a requirement that a drinking establishment had to sell food to have a liquor license. This meant that the local bar, which was actually a hollowed out house, had a menu which consisted of $20 cans of soup and $50 hot pockets. I was drunk enough to buy the hot pocket once.
"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.
I was unaware of the racial motivation. Interesting insight.
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.
I've long wondered if legislation should be required to have "reasonable" justifications provided with it in order to be passed -- and if not, judicial review should be able to strike it down, whether as a whole law, parts of a law, or exemptions in a law.
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.
> if legislation should be required to have "reasonable" justifications provided with it in order to be passed
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].
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.
It often does include such deliberations, if you watch state legislative committee videos on YouTube. If it doesn’t, often times a citizen is free to testify and raise the issue.
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.
After AB5 passed with a list of like 3 dozen exempted industries, I've started to just assume that labor regulations in California are going to have unprincipled lobbyist sponsored carveouts.
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-/
Great question... also why sugar taxes in Seattle, you know those things designed to "fight obesity", don't apply to 550 calorie coffee drinks made in town
It would be ironic if because every other business has higher wages, they lose all their employees and can only hire the otherwise unemployable or lowest performing employees, and it ends up hurting them more than paying the new minimum wage.
Very good point, it is a price floor on the cost of labor. So that could very well happen. Then again, the min wage rising means that other employers will cut positions, to reflect the increase cost of doing business.
On what basis are bakery workers entitled to less wages than, say, they guy at 7-11, or the gas station? I want my food workers paid more than the guy selling slushies.
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.
For many of us small business owners, that 1987 opinion is on the money. The direct and immediate consequence of raising the minimum wage by a bunch is that I'd have to lay a couple of people off, which would be heartbreaking (for them of course, but also for me).
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.
If you’d been giving reasonable cost of living adjustments over the years and paying a living wage to your employees in the first place instead of just paying the minimum, then a raise wouldn’t be such a shock.
27 years is a pretty long time. In that time the wealth gap has widened and the minimum wage fears of businesses closing or poor people not getting a job seems to be false.
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.)
It’s an issue I’ve chosen to have no opinion on. I’ve seen studies showing it reduced employment and I’ve seen studies showing it pressured all wages upwards without reducing employment.
In the end: IDK but it doesn’t seem like the best issue to focus on to help people.
But doesn't it help the state overall, because more people will become ineligible for tax breaks and other diverse subsidies and programs the state offer's for the low-income households. Has any study taken a look at that?
My favorite part was how this politician-bribing, crooked, lobbying business owner is just looking out for his business. Can't blame him. Nope, no blame on these guys modifying the law for their own profit... No, it's all the Governor's fault. It's not as though they were working together on this or anything.
The job of a business owner is to make money for their business. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
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 am a little confused what you are saying here. Are you saying Newsom doesn't deserve all the blame, because I agree with him not deserving it all, but I don't really see anyone claiming he is solely to blame (other than you implying it).
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?
Fair, I didn’t know they had this particular agenda. I just found the turn to be weird because it wasn’t well supported by the content of the article in my opinion. Felt pretty “out of nowhere”.
It's from Reason. I tend to enjoy their articles as interesting and generally well thought out, as long as I keep in mind that they're pretty far down the Libertarian path.
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.)
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.