Joe Erlinger did not mince his words. “This lopsided, hypocritical and ill-considered legislation hurts everyone,” the top McDonald’s executive declared in 2022, as California considered a landmark $20 hourly minimum wage for fast-food workers.

The state ignored such warnings, enforcing a pay rise for an estimated 500,000 people in California – home to some of lowest-paid staff in the US workforce – last April.

Julieta Garcia, a Pizza Hut employee in Los Angeles, said she “had to choose between paying my rent or paying my bills” before last spring. By the time she addressed a meeting of California’s Fast Food Council last summer, she said she could pay both “at the same time” and still have money left over “to take my family to do things and have quality time with them”.

While the legislation – which forced fast-food firms with more than 60 restaurants nationwide to pay workers at least $20 an hour in California – did not hurt workers like Garcia, big chains continue to claim it is damaging their industry, leading to price rises and jobs cuts. Some staff are crying foul.

Wendy’s reported operating profits of $94.7m in the three months to 29 September, down slightly from the year before. Addressing investors in the fall, CEO Kirk Tanner announced the company’s “reimaging” of restaurants was 89% complete.

The $20 minimum wage “helped us”, said Romualda Alcazar Cruz, a Wendy’s employee in Oakland. “Employers have always said they were struggling way before the wage increase, but we’ve seen their businesses continue to prosper. And we see them remodeling their stores this year, yet they continue to say that they don’t have any money to pay wage increases.

“What I want is the public to see this hypocrisy – and to see that they’re only prioritizing what their stores look like, but not the workers inside the stores.”

Wendy’s and McDonald’s did not respond to requests for comment.

“Lots of people think working in fast food is easy, but it’s not. It’s really stressful,” said Marcelo Tagle, a fast-food worker in San Jose, California, at Taco Bell and KFC. “We deal with the public a lot. We move quickly all day on our feet.”

Raises across the industry were “helpful and important”, added Tagel. “It helps a lot.”

‘That’s a lie’

California’s Fast Food Council, which was created as the state introduced the $20 minimum wage last year, can increase it further, either by 3.5% or the annual inflation rate each year. The council’s next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 23 January, in Sacramento.

Workers are already pushing for an increase to $20.70, to keep up with this month’s rise in the broader state minimum wage from $16.00 to $16.50, one of the highest rates in the US.

But they face heavy resistance. Restaurant groups, after aggressively opposing the initial increase, are opposed to further raises above $20 an hour.

“Every day you see headlines of restaurant closures, employee job losses and hours cut, and rising food prices for consumers,” a spokesperson for the International Franchise Association, which represents franchises and includes executives from several fast-food chains on its board, said back in August. “Local restaurant owners in California are already struggling to cope with the $20/hour wage, as the Fast Food Council considers additional wage increases. All the while, workers and consumers are feeling the pinch.”

“We want other workers to know that they have rights and it is an injustice that our employers are not respecting our rights or willing to give us fair wages,” added Alcazar Cruz, the Wendy’s employee in Oakland. “Through the Fast Food Council, we are going to have our voices heard, so the talk stops being about employers going broke, because that’s a lie.”

The argument of job losses has frequently been made in opposition to minimum wage increases. The federal minimum wage has remained $7.25 an hour since 2009, although by 2027 nearly half of all US workers will live in a state with at least a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

But a review by the Economic Policy Institute in September found this narrative to be “largely wrong”, citing that most minimum wage studies find little to no effect on employment.

Research published by the Shift Project at Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco in October found that “many” of California’s fast-food workers “experienced an immediate and meaningful boost to their wages with no unintended consequences for staffing, scheduling, or fringe benefits” after the $20 minimum was introduced.