It’s been five years since Seattle’s landmark $15 minimum wage law. It not only helped workers — it raised their expectations about what's possible and what they deserve.
Recent graduates face enough difficulty trying to find employment and pay off their large student debt. Imagine doing it with a criminal record and trying to find the money to pay for legal fees.
From Alaska to New York City, millions will benefit from an increase minimum wage in 2019. Yet in Michigan and Washington DC legislators overturned referendum votes to raise wages, while the federal government still refuses to act.
The bonds of memory and today’s vast disparities in wealth and well-being tell us that we must continue the struggle launched by workers and by King in the spring of 1968. Today, more people live in poverty in America than in 1968. Now as then, the majority of the poor are “white” but poverty’s heaviest concentration is among people of color, especially young people and women. Poverty exists in part because most of the new jobs in Memphis, as in America, do not pay a living wage.
The California minimum wage earthquake is shaking up state and national politics. There is a powerful lesson from the $15 minimum-wage campaign: only a grassroots movement from below based upon a bold vision for structural reform can change public opinion and pressure government to act.
Our goal should be a living wage, not zero job loss.
People say that the restaurant industry in Portland is incestuous – that everyone’s worked with everyone else – but that’s because people keep switching jobs in search of the mythical balance of tips to hours to number of shifts to physical demand.
Last week actor Alec Baldwin sent out tweets bemoaning the "Fight fir $15" protests in New York City that he claimed made his life inconvenient. New York Times columnist Rachel Swarns responds to Baldwin.
Twenty years after the first living-wage law was passed in Baltimore, the campaign’s lead organizer warns that the model has been watered down.
All great religions instruct their followers on how employers should treat their workers. Living wages are at the center of our deepest moral and faith traditions.
Spread the word