The minimum wage for California fast food workers rose Monday to $20 per hour, as a new law went into effect.
State legislators passed the law last year, in what proponents called a bid to bring greater financial security to hundreds of thousands of people who work in fast food, but detractors said could lead to higher prices and slowed job growth.
The increase sets the minimum wage for fast food workers above the overall state minimum wage of $16 for other industries.
"It gives me a little bit more of a wiggle room," McDonald's worker Jaylene Loubett, of Los Angeles, told NPR.
If anything, Loubett said, the pay hike doesn't go far enough.
"Even though it's a big help, people need to realize that $20 compared to the cost of living in Los Angeles, it's still not enough to feel secure," she said.
For Loubett and the more than 500,000 other people who work at California's fast food restaurants, the raise is a welcome boost in the face of rising cost of living, particularly in the Golden State.
But restaurant owners and other critics say that the higher wages could lead to unintended consequences.
"There isn't a quick-service restaurant owner in California who can easily shoulder an immediate 25% wage increase for all their employees," Mike Whatley, vice president of state affairs and grassroots advocacy for the National Restaurant Association, an industry trade organization, told CBS MoneyWatch.
"Consumers are starting to see this in menu prices, and employees across the state are starting to feel it, too," he said.
Starbucks told the Los Angeles Times that it plans to offset the higher wages, in part, by raising menu prices.
And Alex Johnson, the owner of 10 franchised restaurants in the San Francisco area, including Auntie Anne's and Cinnabon outposts, told CBS MoneyWatch that he plans to introduce more automation to reduce the need for human labor, and is considering shifting focus to restaurants in nearby Nevada.
"I work really hard to treat employees fairly, but there are consequences to these actions that increase costs - we're not hiring anymore, and I'm contemplating closing or selling my restaurants," Johnson told the outlet. "It's a sad time."
For now, though, workers and advocates are treating the pay hike as a win.
"The $20 raise is great. I wish this would have come sooner," Ingrid Vilorio, an immigrant who now works part-time at a Jack in the Box after previously working full-time at McDonald's, told the Associated Press. "Because I would not have been looking for so many other jobs in different places."
