Can America Handle a $30 Minimum Wage?

As the affordability crisis accelerates, workers around the country are pushing for minimum wage hikes that make the Fight for $15 look tame.

In 2012, in what The New York Times called “the biggest wave of job actions in the history of America’s fast-food industry,” workers in New York City walked off their jobs and held a protest demanding a $15 minimum wage. The so-called Fight for $15 was born, and over the next few years workers in cities around the country joined the protests, while the federal minimum wage continued to languish at $7.25 an hour, where it had been since 2009.

It’s still stuck at $7.25, but 30 states and Washington, D.C., have since raised their own minimum wages—from $8.75 in West Virginia to $17.95 in D.C.—and 68 cities and counties have increased their minimums above their states’. There remain plenty of foot-draggers—20 states still abide by the federal minimum of $7.25—but the Fight for $15 continues to win converts: In Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the state House passed a bill to raise the minimum to that very amount.

To some activists, though, a $15 minimum is old news. At a rally last week in Oakland, California, workers and activists aligned with One Fair Wage, a nonprofit group that supports restaurant employees, launched a campaign for a $30 minimum wage in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and Berkeley. Workers have launched similar campaigns around the country, including those for $30 in Hawaii, New York City, and Los Angeles, and $25 in Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, said at the rally that the push for a “Living Wage for All” was the new Fight for $15, and that the campaign was committed to showing that the minimum wage could be raised even further without sacrificing small businesses. “It’s not workers versus small businesses,” she said, then connected her campaign to the fight against inequality overall: “It’s all of us together against the one percent that has been hoarding the profits over the last many decades, many generations, to the point where all of us are struggling to survive.”

These proposed minimum wages, which would be the highest in the country if any of them pass, have inspired dismissive ridicule from some........

© New Republic