WILLOW GROVE, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — Kelly Maguire, shop lead at &pizza restaurant in Willow Grove, said being paid $15 an hour has changed her life for the better. She’s actually able to save money.
“Just being able to come into work — and that’s all you have to worry about, is just working and getting that job done instead of all the 50 other things that are at home,” she said.
Jennifer Berrier, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, hopes other businesses follow suit.
She visited the restaurant Thursday, calling for the state’s minimum wage to be raised from $7.25 an hour to $12, with a path in place to get to $15 an hour by 2027.
“This pandemic has shown a spotlight on minimum wage work where there’s no guarantee of being able to pay your bills,” Berrier said. Raising the minimum wage “provides dignity to [workers] so that they can have more money in their pockets, so that they can insert more money into the local economies.”
She said there are also successful business models where profit margins don’t “lie on the backs of workers.”
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Michael Lastoria, CEO and founder of &pizza, pays his employees $15 an hour. He said a restaurant’s biggest expense is employee turnover, but since increasing wages, he said he hasn’t experienced a labor shortage or a loss of revenue.
“The secret to our success is to keep your staff and to keep your workforce employed for more than a year,” he said.
“If we can keep a restaurant general manager in a restaurant for over a year, we will see anywhere from 3% to 5% revenue growth. For every 10% of the hourly workforce that we can keep in the restaurant for over a year, we see a 1% revenue growth.
“You are also spending significantly fewer dollars on the cost of recruiting and training, which we, on average, is roughly $5,000 to get someone up to speed to be able to produce efficiently. So there’s massive costs in lower wages and inherent turnover.”
He also maintains retention with a Lyft partnership, which subsidizes employee transportation to the pizza shop.
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Before &pizza, Maguire wasn’t being paid a living wage — which is what she believes is fueling the labor shortage.
“The employees are just being taken advantage of and because of that, they don’t want to work. They don’t want to put as much effort into it. They’re stressed out because they’re overworked,” she said.
Berrier said more than 1 million workers and their families in Pennsylvania would benefit from the raise to $12 an hour.