Minimum wage enters presidential landscape
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 thenunthinkable $15 minimum wage. Now, according to the National Employment Law Project, onethird of the country will have a $15 minimum wage as gradual increases in bedrock Democratic states such as 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.”
The tight job market has led some companies such as 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.
A few booming cities such as Seattle and San Francisco have already hit a $15 minimum wage, and evidence on the impact is mixed, with some studies showing that higher wages are boosting local economies but others following the traditional patterns that economists warn about with minimum wage hikes — that they can lead to fewer jobs by raising business payroll costs.
“If $15 is causing speed bumps in San Francisco, what does it mean in Sioux Falls?” asked Michael Saltsman of the Employment Policies Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., that opposes the higher wage. “We will get to the end of 2020, and $15 will be a largely blue state phenomenon.”