(NEW AMERICAN) – Nearly a third of California’s restaurants have permanently closed, and two-thirds of workers at least temporarily lost their jobs since Governor Gavin Newsom (D) imposed the nation’s first statewide lockdown, a California Senate committee reported Tuesday.
The Senators observe that “few sectors have been battered more by the COVID-19 pandemic than the restaurant industry.”
The report states that “before the COVID-19,” or, rather, before the lockdowns, more than 76,000 eating and drinking establishments in the Golden State employed around 1.4 million people, and up to one million of these employees were terminated or laid off in the first few weeks of the lockdown, with many more facing similar consequences in the following weeks.
