“There are a lot of misconceptions about who low-wage workers are. Most low-wage workers, including fast-food workers, are adults and are the main providers in their families,” said Enrique Lopezlira.

The wage increase is expected to cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in increased wages for some state workers and increased payments in the state’s Medicaid program, according to an analysis by the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center.

Young people lived through the great recession of 2009 and the pandemic, and economic insecurity is a very real fear, Anibel Ferus-Comelo said.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates nearly 3.2 million Californians won’t have health insurance next year, the largest percentage of them immigrants who are living in the country illegally.

Still, about 3.2 million people in the state are projected to not have health insurance next year, according to UC Berkeley Labor Center. Nearly half of those people are living in the country illegally, making them ineligible for full Medicaid benefits and other health insurance assistance programs.

“These are unacceptable deaths, each of which could have been prevented if we had had adequate supply chains in place in advance of the pandemic,” said UC Berkeley Professor William Dow.