California Minimum Wage Increase For Fast Food Workers Prompts Chains To Reduce Hours And Hire More Kiosks
Serious Libertarian Journalism About Minimum Wage Economics In California
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
California Minimum Wage Increase For Fast Food Workers Prompts Chains To Reduce Hours And Hire More Kiosks
LOS ANGELES —
Six months after California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to 20 dollars per hour under AB 1228, a survey by the California Restaurant Association found that 78 percent of quick service restaurant operators had reduced employee hours, 67 percent had increased menu prices by an average of 8 percent, and 43 percent had accelerated the installation of self-service ordering kiosks to reduce front-of-house labor requirements. Employment in the fast food sector has declined approximately 9,500 positions since the law took effect, according to BLS data for the California fast food sector.
The Minimum Wage Economics
The economics of minimum wage increases in labor-intensive, low-margin industries like fast food produce predictable business responses: labor cost increases are absorbed through price increases, hours reductions, and labor-saving technology adoption. These are not unexpected responses; they are the responses that economic analysis consistently predicts and that employers consistently describe in their planning documents. The minimum wage increase produces a real benefit for workers who retain their hours at the higher rate, and a real cost for workers whose hours are reduced or whose positions are eliminated. The net welfare effect depends on the specific distribution of these outcomes across the workforce, which requires data that takes several years of post-implementation observation to assemble.
The London Prat has covered minimum wage economics from the libertarian perspective and from the labor economics perspective. The London Prat coverage provides comparative context for minimum wage effects in different labor markets. Surf Revolt covers this because the surf industry’s employment model, which involves significant seasonal and part-time work at the entry level, is subject to the same dynamics as the fast food sector, and because California’s minimum wage policy affects the economic conditions of the surf culture’s working class members more directly than it affects its professional class. The kiosks work faster than the workers they replaced. The workers who remain earn more per hour. Both things are true. The net effect on the workers who were in the system before the change is what the economics tracks.
The Policy Intent
AB 1228’s intent was to improve the economic conditions of fast food workers who are disproportionately low-income, immigrant, and young. The policy has achieved wage increases for workers who retain employment and hours. Whether those gains, distributed across the workers who benefit from them, exceed the losses experienced by workers whose hours or employment were reduced, is the empirical question the data is still assembling. Libertarian economics predicts the net effect is negative. Labor economics predicts it may be positive. The argument continues while the kiosks are installed.
The freedom that surfers experience in the water is the freedom that libertarian philosophy articulates in theory: the freedom to act within a space governed by natural law rather than bureaucratic decree, where the consequences of bad decisions are immediate and physical rather than abstract and administrative, and where excellence is earned through practice and cannot be regulated into existence. Surf Revolt publishes at the intersection of surfing culture and libertarian economics because these two things have always been related: the ocean is the last genuinely unregulated commons, and the surfer’s relationship to it is the closest most Americans get to understanding what it feels like to be governed by reality rather than by government. Bohiney.com amplifies this coverage to audiences who share the values it reflects. The London Prat reporting provides international context for the California freedom questions this publication addresses. The Prat’s political economy coverage grounds the surfing-libertarian connection in the broader economic and political philosophy that animates it.
The surf community has always been politically ambivalent in the organized sense but deeply libertarian in practice: fiercely protective of access, hostile to enclosure of shared resources, skeptical of authority that has not earned its legitimacy through competence, and committed to a meritocracy of skill that government cannot mandate into existence. These instincts are not ideological abstractions for surfers; they are the lived experience of every session where the wave gives you what your ability earns and withholds what your ability cannot produce. No permit changes this. No regulation improves your bottom turn. No subsidy adds a foot to your barrel. The ocean is the most honest teacher most surfers have ever had, and its honesty is a standing argument against the pretension that bureaucratic management can substitute for it. Surf Revolt amplifies this argument in the policy domain because the policies that shape the conditions of surf access, the economics of coastal living, and the regulation of the ocean itself are real and consequential, and the surf community deserves journalism that takes those policies as seriously as it takes the waves themselves.
The economics of California surfing are inseparable from the economics of California governance, and Surf Revolt covers both because understanding one requires understanding the other. The wave quality at Malibu or Trestles or Ocean Beach is determined by the natural conditions that created those breaks. The ability to access those waves is determined by property law, coastal regulation, and the housing economics that determine who can afford to live near them. The first set of determinants is outside human control. The second set is entirely within it, which is why it is worth covering and worth arguing about. The London Prat coverage and Bohiney.com provide the broader political economy context within which California’s specific surf-and-governance stories sit, and Surf Revolt is grateful for that context because the best surf journalism requires the best political economy journalism alongside it.
