California's controversial minimum wage hike added nearly 11,000 jobs to the state's economy, according to Governor Gavin Newsom.
However, celebrity chef Andrew Gruel offered an explanation about the governor's latest “self-laudatory promotion.”
“It's a little early to put the book on the shelf and celebrate victory here. This is typical Gavin Newsom self-praising propaganda based on questionable data,” Gruel argued during an appearance Thursday on “Varney & Company.”
“These are not even seasonally adjusted numbers, number one. Number two, he's using nine or 10 months. And in reality, there's only been three months in this data in which the bill actually took effect. So, you could reduce those numbers to maybe 5 or 6,000, which, in the grand scheme of 750,000 jobs, is not a huge number,” explained the chef, who currently owns five restaurants, one of which is based in California.
Gruel continued to dismiss Newsom’s claims, arguing that even if his highly publicized statistics are accurate, his policy will continue to have “unintended consequences.”
“First of all, when these multi-unit restaurants found out about this bill, the first thing they did was take the people who were working overtime, meaning more than 40 hours, and cut their hours down to 25 or 30 hours. Those people moved to other jobs. They split the positions. So instead of having one person work 55 or 60 hours, they're having two people work 30 or 32 hours, making it a full-time job,” he explained.
Newsom raised the state’s minimum wage to $20 an hour in April of this year.
Gruel argues that since the policy went into effect, this shiny new policy has had unexpected consequences that are plaguing the struggling food industry.
The celebrity chef revealed that his restaurants were flooded with people looking for other jobs last April, and that his businesses have been flooded with leads in the months since.
Greuel continued to refute Newsom’s rosy statistics about the state’s job economy.
“We didn't take into account the fact that full-service restaurants have declined significantly. So, you have an increase of maybe 6,000 or 7,000 in fast food jobs, but full-service restaurants are also closing. Well, why is that? Because I said from the beginning that this $20 an hour mandate is not just for restaurants with more than 20 locations in the fast food sector,” Gruel concluded.
“By targeting such a large sector of the industry, you're artificially inflating it without any orders. But it's really orders for every single restaurant, and especially full service. It's crushing the industry on all sides. But we haven't even seen the data yet.”
