Washington’s affordability debate is missing wages

When Angelica Hernandez joined a union, her McDonald’s manager warned her that the company had an army of lawyers, the union would rob her, and she would end up living under a bridge. For three years, Hernandez had resisted joining, afraid of retaliation or losing her job. What finally pushed her to sign on was the intimidation itself.

“If I end up living under a bridge,” she remembered thinking, “I’m going to fight to make sure it doesn’t happen to others.”

Her story contains the missing half of America’s affordability debate. Politicians talk about making rent, groceries, health care, and child care cheaper. They talk much less about whether workers earn enough to keep pace.

With the midterms approaching, affordability has become the defining economic issue of American politics. But it is too often framed as a crisis of prices alone, as though paychecks were fixed and the only solution was to make things cheaper.

Prices and wages come down to the same question: Does a job pay enough to live?

The Fight for $15 forced that question onto the national agenda. When roughly 200 fast-food workers walked off their jobs in New York City in November 2012, they sought more than double the federal minimum wage. The demand was dismissed as unserious. President Obama was calling for a $9 minimum wage; leading Democrats considered $10.10 ambitious. Yet workers chose a number that reflected what survival required rather than what Washington considered plausible.

By the end of 2026, 79 jurisdictions will have reached or exceeded a $15 minimum wage. The National Employment Law Project estimates that the movement helped produce $150 billion in raises for 26 million workers. It also widened the........

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