California’s minimum wage of $16 an hour is nearly double the federal minimum wage standard. Starting in April, most fast-food workers will get $20 an hour, which some complain is too much for lower-skilled workers.
However, a new report released Tuesday by California's legislative analyst office suggested that $16 an hour isn’t nearly enough to keep up with the high cost of living in the state.
KNX News spoke to Seth Kerstein, an economist at the LAO who authored Tuesday’s report.
“In our report, we looked at the state $16 an hour minimum wage in a variety of ways, and one of the ways we did that was specifically to compare that minimum wage and the various local minimum wages in parts of California, including in the L.A. area, to housing costs at the county level,” he said.
Housing in California's major metro areas, including L.A., is unaffordable for minimum wage workers, Kerstein said.
“There are some occupations that account for a rather large share of low-wage workers, and so those include home health care aids, they include fast food workers at least for the next few weeks,” he said.
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The study suggested that minimum wage workers can’t comfortably live in any major city in the state.
“We took a look at sort of those areas and sort of compared a few different types of households that might mainly get their incomes for minimum wage work, including single parents and couples who might both be working minimum wage jobs,” Kerstein said.
In these cases, they consistently found that housing costs in major cities in the state were over 30% of the gross incomes that would be earned by those types of families. In some cases, it was well above 30%, he said.
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