Should the government raise the federal minimum wage?

Mass Layoffs At California Restaurants Ahead Of $20 Hourly Wage Mandate

California restaurants are reportedly laying off staff and reducing hours for other team members in an effort to cut costs ahead of a California state law taking effect on April 1 that will raise fast-food workers’ hourly wage to $20.In the months leading up to the wage mandate, California eateries, particularly pizza joints, have established a plan to cut jobs, according to state records obtained by The Wall Street Journal.Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza — a Menlo Park, Calif.-founded chain of 400 pizza parlors, mostly on the West Coast — have said they plan to lay off around 1,280 delivery drivers this year, according to records that major employers must submit to the state before large layoffs, The Journal reported.Pizza Hut already sent notices to employees informing them of their last day.Michael Ojeda, a Pizza Hut driver for eight years in Ontario, Calif., received one of the notes from Pizza Hut franchisee Southern California Pizza in December telling him that his last day of work would be in February.Southern California Pizza — which operates 224 Pizza Huts in the greater Los Angeles area — offered $400 in severance if Ojeda stayed through February, according to The Journal.But Ojeda, who told the outlet that he made hundreds of dollars a week in wages and tips as a delivery driver, decided to claim unemployment instead. “Pizza Hut was my career for nearly a decade and with little to no notice it was taken away,” said 29-year-old Ojeda, who was supporting his mother and partner on his Pizza Hut delivery wages.

Bernie Sanders Proposes Reducing Workweek to 32 Hours

Senator Bernie Sanders this week unveiled legislation to reduce the standard workweek in the United States from 40 hours to 32, without a reduction in pay, saying Americans are working longer hours for less pay despite advances in technology and productivity.The law, if passed, would pare down the workweek over a four-year period, lowering the threshold at which workers would be eligible to receive overtime pay. The 40-hour workweek has stood as the standard in the United States since it became enshrined in federal law in 1940.In a hearing on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on the proposed law, Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, said profits from boosts in productivity over the decades had been reaped only by corporate leaders, and not shared with workers.“The sad reality is that Americans now work more hours than the people of any other wealthy nation,” he said, citing statistics that workers in the U.S. on average work for hundreds of hours longer each week than their counterparts in Japan, Britain and Germany.Mr. Sanders is far from the first to propose the idea, which has been floated by Richard Nixon, pitched by autoworkers and experimented with by companies ranging from Shake Shack to Kickstarter and Unilever’s New Zealand unit.

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