Minimum wage is part of presidential landscape for 2020

From liberal firebrands Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to moderates Joe Biden and John Hickenlooper, nearly the entire 2020 Democratic presidential field agrees that the federal minimum wage should be more than doubled, to $15 an hour.

That near-unanimity reflects the success of an unorthodox campaign by the Service Employees International Union called the Fight for 15. It launched in 2012 to help nonunion McDonald’s workers who walked off their jobs as cooks and servers agitate for a then-unthinkable $15 minimum wage. Now, according to the National Employment Law Project, one-third of the country will have a $15 minimum wage as gradual increases in bedrock Democratic states like California, Illinois and New York kick in over the coming years.

Ernie Tedeschi, an analyst at Evercore ISI, calculated the de facto national minimum wage at a historic high of $12 an hour when accounting for a flurry of recent city and statewide increases . Officially, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour.

Other than the sudden jump on wages and its hold in the Democratic primary, the Fight for 15 is also showcasing a different form of labor organizing as traditional union membership has dwindled.

“The labor movement is reinventing themselves as a new civil rights movement by helping workers in ways beyond collective bargaining,” said Gary Chaison, an industrial relations professor at Clark University in Massachusetts. “This may be the last national political contest for the unions. A loss means the loss of relevancy as a workplace voice, and a win means a new purpose for the unions, outside of collective bargaining.”

Still, unions also need dues-paying members, and the movement is redoubling its efforts this week to pressure McDonald’s into letting its workers unionize. Democratic presidential aspirants like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee will join workers on picket lines this week, and Sanders will host a video town hall with employees of the fastfood giant who will protest outside the company’s board meeting in Dallas on Thursday.

“That’s the lynchpin of the thing that we’re asking elected officials to respond to,” said Mary Kay Henry, SEIU’s president, who has been demanding that presidential aspirants also detail how they’ll make it easier for workers to join unions. “We’re trying to make a demand for a union about having a seat at the table that allows workers to be able to have a say in how decisions are made.”

That may not be easy. McDonalds has argued that whether to allow unions is a decision for the franchisees who own the restaurants and employ the workers, not for the corporation. Labor groups worry that the new Republican-appointed majority on the National Labor Relations Board will prevent unions from forcing McDonald’s to bargain for those employees.

The tight job market has led some companies like Amazon and Target to offer a $15 minimum wage. But even though the $15 minimum wage has largely unified the Democratic presidential hopefuls—only technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang opposes it, arguing he’d rather have the government pay people directly—a bill to implement a national wage at that level is stalled in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. Democratic moderates worry it would be an economic shock to areas that don’t already have high wages.