The Fight For $15 | The Fight for $15: Past, Present, and Future

When fast food workers in New York City went on strike in November 2012, they had two demands: a minimum wage of $15 per hour and a union. Nearly a decade later, a $15 minimum wage is a reality for forty percent of the U.S. workforce. The dream of a union for fast food workers, however, has proven more elusive, due to the structural barriers against workers organizing in the U.S. as well as the inherent difficulties in organizing workers in a high-turnover industry. But the fight for a $15 minimum wage is also far from finished, particularly for the tipped workers who have been exempted from the vast majority of minimum wage laws. In the months and years ahead, the movement must continue pressing for a federal minimum wage increase for all workers — and for legislation that will make it easier to build fighting unions to empower workers in the long term.

Scaling Up: Local Victories that Built Momentum at the State and Federal Levels

While the Fight for $15 might have started with a few hundred workers in fast food jobs in New York City, the call for $15 and a union quickly spread throughout the country. The first of many victories came in tiny SeaTac, Washington, where a ballot proposal to raise the minimum wage for hospitality and transportation workers to $15 won by just 77 votes during the November 2013 election. The narrow margin prompted opponents to demand a hand recount and sue the city. But despite legal challenges (which the city ultimately won), the victory in SeaTac was significant and immediate: it persuaded neighboring Seattle to adopt — just six months later — the nation’s first-ever $15 minimum wage law in a major city, this time via legislation. San Francisco followed in November 2014, when an overwhelming number of voters approved a ballot initiative for a gradual increase to $15. 

The victories in those three cities paved the way for state action — first in California and New York in 2016, then in Massachusetts in 2018; New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, and Maryland in 2019; and Florida and Virginia in 2020. In Washington, DC, the city council and mayor reached an agreement in 2016 to raise the city’s wage floor to $15. 

Although raising the wage floor at the federal level has proven more difficult, the Fight for $15 has had a profound effect on national politics — changing the conversation about poverty wages, racial and gender inequity on the job, and the urgent need for federal action. The Democratic Party adopted a $15 minimum wage as part of its platform — with every candidate in the 2018-2020 Democratic primaries endorsing a $15 minimum wage — and the party won a majority in the Senate following runoff elections in Georgia in January 2021, in part based on the promise of delivering a $15 minimum wage nationwide.

The Fight for $15 has not only scaled up from local to state to federal action; it has also moved from the East and West Coasts to the South, Southwest, and Midwest. Following victories in SeaTac and Seattle, and at the same time as San Francisco voters approved a $15 wage floor, voters in four states not typically associated with progressive politics (Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota) approved more modest but meaningful minimum wage increases via ballot initiatives. In the years that followed, Arizona, Arkansas (for a second time), Colorado, Missouri, and New Mexico all adopted higher minimum wages. Tables 1 and 2 provide a comprehensive list of states, cities and counties that have approved higher minimum wages since the Fight for $15 began in 2012.

The Challenges That Remain

Despite facing powerful opponents in well-funded business groups and ideologically-driven legislators, the Fight for $15 has been a great success. As the tables below detail, since 2012, 28 states and 51 cities and counties have raised their wage floors. These victories have raised the wages of approximately 25 million workers by a combined $142 billion in additional annual earnings. A significant share of benefiting workers are women and people of color, who typically are overrepresented in occupations paying low wages.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the very success of the Fight for $15 has also prompted minimum wage detractors to use preemption laws to hinder further progress. Minimum wage preemption bars cities and counties from adopting higher wage floors of their own, and can be used preemptively or retroactively. To date, 25 states have minimum wage preemption laws. Of these, 15 adopted these laws since 2012.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) estimates that due to retroactive preemption, 346,000 workers have lost $1.5 billion in additional annual wages. We also find that in cities with sizable Black and brown populations — such as Birmingham, Alabama, and St. Louis, Missouri — local policymakers have been denied the means to raise the wage floors for their overwhelmingly worker-of-color constituents by majority white state legislatures.

Another challenge that the movement for higher wages has faced is the difficulty in eliminating carve-outs for tipped workers, the majority of whom are women and workers of color. Currently, only seven states require that employers pay tipped workers the full minimum wage. In the other 43 states, employers can pay tipped workers a base wage lower than the full minimum wage, provided that workers earn enough in tips to bring them up to the full minimum wage.  

Of the 28 states that raised wages since 2012, none has adopted a provision gradually phasing out the tipped subminimum wage. Maine’s 2016 ballot initiative, which increased the minimum wage to $12 by 2020, had included a tipped sub-minimum wage elimination. However, following passage, the state legislature — in concert with restaurant industry groups — quickly moved to strike down that provision. Similarly, in 2018, DC voters approved a ballot initiative gradually eliminating the tipped subminimum wage, only to have the City Council repeal it a few months later. Here, too, restaurant industry groups played a major role. Flagstaff, Arizona, is the only jurisdiction that has been successful in adopting and defending an elimination of the tipped subminimum wage. Flagstaff’s tipped wage is expected to reach parity with the full minimum wage in 2026.

Although the elimination of the tipped subminimum wage remains a significant challenge, since 2012, six states (Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and South Dakota) have raised their tipped wage by approving provisions that specifically raise the tipped wage. In addition, in states where the tipped subminimum wage is set as a percentage of the full minimum wage (Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, and Vermont) or where the tipped wage is set as a specific dollar amount below the full minimum wage (Arizona, Colorado, and Florida), increases in the full minimum wage have had the effect of also raising the tipped subminimum wage. One state (West Virginia) has lowered its tipped wage since 2012.

What’s Next

Although minimum wage campaigns have dwindled over the past couple of years, the need to raise wages remains. Nowhere in the country can single workers without family responsibilities make ends meet on the current federal minimum wage. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute estimates that in all but two counties, single workers need more than $15 today to afford the absolute basics (a $15 minimum wage in 2012 would be the equivalent of $17.31 in today’s dollars). Workers raising children, of course, need significantly higher wages.

Although states and localities can and should consider raising their wage floors further, as they have been doing since 2012, there are other means of raising wages, such as raising the federal wage floor and protecting and empowering workers who want to unionize. 

The federal minimum wage. Over the past several weeks, the urgency of raising the federal minimum wage has been much discussed, due in large part to Senator Bernie Sanders’s resolute advocacy for including the federal minimum wage in the first budget reconciliation bill. Although this effort ultimately failed, Congress can still raise the federal wage floor through a standalone bill. Such a bill has already been introduced in both the House and Senate, and enjoys a total of 234 cosponsors in both chambers, though passing it remains an uphill battle. Nonetheless, the importance of this policy cannot be underestimated: while thirty states and the District of Columbia have made progress in raising wages, there are currently 21 states with effective wage floors of just $7.25 per hour. (Virginia’s minimum wage will increase to $9.50 in May, at which point the number of states with a $7.25 wage floor will decrease to twenty.) Approximately half of those states are in the South, where a majority of African Americans live. Hence, raising the federal minimum wage is not just urgently needed economic policy but also a matter of racial justice. 

Collective bargaining. Major retailers’ decision to raise their wages have made the news in recent years. NELP has found that, since 2012, over one hundred businesses of all sizes have raised their starting wages — most to $15 or more. The actions of these employers are the result not only of the success of Fight for $15 campaigns, but also of worker organizing efforts — both of which put pressure on employers to raise wages, in many cases through collective bargaining agreements. In Denver, Colorado, for example, janitorial and airport workers won raises to $15 after successful bargaining. Ditto for nursing home and Walt Disney workers in Florida. Workers in the healthcare industry have been mostly likely to win higher wages through collective bargaining. 

In some instances, collective bargaining agreements with specific employers have pushed others to raise wages on their own — as was the case with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Tufts Medical Center in Boston, which announced wage increases just days after Boston Medical Center signed a collective bargaining agreement for higher wages and a few months after home care workers negotiated a $15 minimum wage with the state of Massachusetts.

Strong unions are indispensable for fostering worker power, raising labor standards, and — as the examples above suggest — raising the wages of union and non-union workers alike. The right to organize needs to be protected and strengthened. The PRO Act, which was recently introduced in the U.S. House, would do just that. Thus, in the coming years, as the tide of minimum wage campaigns and victories recedes, union organizing will be a viable means of expanding the call for higher wages — and of winning tangible results. Good-old-fashioned collective bargaining efforts will no doubt remain an important driver of higher wages, now and in the future.

Table 1: States that Raised Wage Floors Since 2012

Table 2: Higher Local Wage Floors Since 2012 (Laws in Effect Today)