Fast food workers push for wage hikes. Millions of fast food workers across the U.S. are scraping to get by. About two-thirds of them are women, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and many are supporting their families on minimum wages set at the federal government’s floor of $7.25 an hour.
Fast food workers are disproportionately Hispanic, making up 24.6% of the industry’s workforce compared with 18.8% of the overall workforce. More than half of all U.S. fast food workers are 20 or older, “contrary to the myth of it being a teenage job that they just do for pocket money,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, an attorney for the nonprofit advocacy organization National Employment Law Project.
President Donald Trump, who manned the fry station at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania while on the campaign trail last year, has acknowledged that the federal minimum wage is “very low” and that he would consider raising it, but that doing so would be “complicated.”
Meanwhile, a growing number of states have pushed for fast food workers wage hikes in the face of record-high inflation in recent years. Voters in Alaska approved a ballot initiative in November that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour from $11.73 an hour by 2027. Missouri voters likewise approved a minimum wage hike to $15 from $12.30 an hour by 2026. And California — which has one of the highest costs of living in the country — raised wages for fast food workers specifically to $20 an hour from $16 an hour in April.
By the end of this year, 23 states and 65 cities and counties will have raised their minimum wage floors, according to a December 2024 National Employment Law Project report that combed through legislation across the country.
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