What’s at stake in Fight for $15? More than higher pay

Wendy’s sponsored the news segment.

The one on adoption, the one with the little boy calming stating that he just wanted a mom, someone who could help him get a job.

The corporate sponsorship from the industry giant provided a final cruel twist to one fast food worker’s long battle.

From a feel-good philanthropic perspective, it made sense. The weekly news installment highlights children in need of an adoptive home.

Wendy’s was founded by Dave Thomas, who was adopted. He used some of his vast hamburger and French fries-derived wealth to start a foundation for kids in foster care.

But the boy recently profiled in Kansas City, a child just turned 13, was well-known in social justice circles. Phone lines and social media exploded in grief, outrage and concern for the boy who many quickly recognized.

His late mother,

Amanda Ruth, was a low wage, fast food worker.

Ruth spent her last years as part of the national Fight for $15 movement, waging battle against companies like Wendy’s by pressing for a raise in the federal minimum wage and gaining union representation.

For people aligned with the movement, it was hurtful to see Wendy’s plugging for a new family for the son of a minimum wage worker while they’d refused to pay employees a higher minimum wage.

It harshly illustrated truths about the nation’s priorities around work, about who deserves and what constitutes fair compensation.

The adoption segment aired as politicians in Washington D.C. were destroying efforts to gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour across the nation. It’s been stagnant at $7.25 since 2009. The proposal was stripped from the COVID19 relief package. An amendment with the same goal was attempted by

Sen. Bernie Sanders, but it too failed.

Republicans argued that now was not the time for even incrementally raising the bottom floor on wages. Not when small businesses are struggling and going under.

Fast food executives argue that kiosks will replace workers who are too costly and that tenuously thin productivity vs. labor scales can’t absorb even phasing to $15 by 2025.

Those arguments were bolstered by the Congressional Budget Office, which predicted 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty by the defeated proposal, but that another 1.4 million jobs would be lost.

No one view captures every consideration and there are many variables. But context is often skipped.

If adjusted for productivity, the minimum wage should be at about $24 an hour, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Wages stopped keeping up with production around 1968.

At the same time, the entire job market, along with the demographics of the nation, have shifted. About half of minimum wage earners are over 25 years of age. They’re not all teens on their way to college and lifetimes of middle class earnings.

Doing nothing means that the threat of generational poverty is compounding as well, with children being unable to escape the circumstances of their parent’s struggles.

It cannot definitively be argued that a bigger paycheck, health care, quality addiction treatment — Ruth struggled with substance abuse and depression — or a union would have saved Ruth. But it’s not a stretch to see that those benefits would have greatly helped relieve her struggles, therefore helping her children too.

Mary Sanchez writes for The Kansas City Star.