Creative Commons
I still remember watching Pamela Flood dance on that first picket line, way back in November 2012. I have pictures of her with her fuschia-dyed hair, leading the charge and telling her story to the gathered crowd the very first time fast food workers in the United States struck for $15 an hour and a union.
Outside a Wendy’s on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, she told the crowd that, because of low wages, she and her three children had wound up homeless.
We probably should have known that Democrats’ promises would come to little, and that even those lawmakers from states where voters have already raised their own damn wages would say, “Nay.”
The thing about Flood that sticks with me, though, is her declaration: “My kids deserve better! I’m tired of $7.25. I want that $15 so I can sit and relax and decide to go on vacation.” After all, if it was good enough for her boss, why not for her?
At a rally later that day in Times Square, she added, “I’ve been working fast food since I was sixteen.” At twenty-two, she was still making $7.25. She led the crowd in a chant of “I made a change! I’m not settling for less!”
New York City raised its minimum wage in 2016, after four years of strikes and rallies by those same workers; the wage was raised incrementally across the state until it hit $15 in 2019. Restaurants, contra the doom-and-gloom predictions, didn’t disappear. (It’s COVID-19 that’s given many of them a death blow.) But the national minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25 an hour, where it’s been since 2009, the long- est period without a hike since the minimum wage was enacted in 1938.
And if the still-powerful Senate minority has its way, there it will stay, despite the action, demands, and at times desperation of thousands of workers like Pamela Flood.
In the ensuing nearly twelve years since minimum wage workers got a federally mandated raise, the value of $7.25 has eroded badly. A 2019 estimate by the Economic Policy Institute figures that the minimum wage was worth 17 percent less that year than it was when it was last increased—meaning a pay cut of more than $3,000 for Pamela Flood and others like her.
And it’s worth more than 30 percent less than the real value of the minimum wage at its peak, in 1968. Not coincidentally, shortly after that peak moment, workers’ incomes and productivity increases diverged, and haven’t reconnected. As another EPI study noted, “Since 1973, hourly compensation of the vast majority of American workers has not risen in line with economy-wide productivity. In fact, hourly compensation has almost stopped rising at all.”
Bosses aren’t giving raises, and neither is the federal government. Instead, we are just expected to work harder by, perhaps, following Dolly Parton’s infamous Super Bowl ad, getting a “5 to 9” side hustle.
Sociologist Jamie McCallum and economic historian Aaron Benanav, in their respective recent books, both note that the reality of twenty-first-century employment is pervasive underemployment, where much of a worker’s time is spent hustling for enough work to pay the bills at the low rates that are offered. The title of a campaign by the hotel workers’ union UNITE HERE! says it all: One Job Should Be Enough.
And so the attempt to include raising the federal minimum wage—eventually to $15 an hour, but immediately to $9.50—in the first big COVID-19 relief package of the Biden Administration should have been welcome. Hell, it should have been, as they say, a no-brainer.
A CNN graphic, drawing on research by political scientist Chris Warshaw, on March 7 showed the relief package had an approval rating of 71 percent, making it one of the most popular pieces of major legislation in recent history. The only things more popular than this relief bill were the Brady Bill (for gun control) and the last raise of the minimum wage. And yet the Senate voted not to include it.
We knew the professions of working-class solidarity from Yale-educated Republicans like Josh Hawley were worthless. We probably should have known, too, that Democrats’ promises would come to little, and that when pressed, even those lawmakers from states where voters have already, by sweeping majorities, raised their own damn wages would say, “Nay.”
Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, made a show of casting her vote against the minimum wage increase, by giving a dramatic thumbs down. Apparently enjoying her new status as She Who Must Be Appeased, alongside Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the gods of the free market, Sinema comes from a state where the minimum wage is already much higher than the national minimum and pegged to inflation. In rejecting the raise, she’s courting donors, not her own constituents—58 percent of whom voted for that Arizona raise.
Also voting no to a federal wage hike were fellow Democratic Senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (where the minimum wage is stuck at $7.25), Jon Tester of Montana ($8.65, pegged to inflation), Chris Coons and Tom Carper from Joe Biden’s own state of Delaware ($9.75, increasing again in October to $10.25), and Independent Senator Angus King of Maine ($12.15, pegged to inflation).
As a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, released just after the vote, found, thirty-two million workers would benefit from a raise of the federal minimum wage to $15—a whopping 21 percent of the workforce.
The move by Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, to force the vote on $15 was technically a “procedural vote.” But the intricacies of Senate drama are lost on most Americans, who don’t hang on the details of a day in Congress when Sinema apparently arrived carrying a chocolate cake, inviting Marie Antoinette comparisons.
Most people have no idea that the Senate even has a parliamentarian, let alone what this job entails. What people do know is the state of their bank accounts, and too many of them are suffering while the rich keep on getting richer.
It’s worth noting that the relief package does contain a whole lot that will make working people’s lives easier. But, as David Dayen at The American Prospect recently observed, it is mostly temporary.
“We have the outline of a child allowance but it expires in a year,” he wrote. “The ACA subsidies expire in two years. The massive expansion of unemployment eligibility for a much wider group of workers is now done on Labor Day weekend.” This bill, while massive (and, again, quite popular), mostly kicks the can down the road, and when those bits expire, there will be another fight.
Meanwhile, work still doesn’t pay for millions of Americans. It is a simple fact that hard work is not, for many people, a way to a better life. Instead, it’s just a grinding, miserable part of so many people’s existence, with little promise of anything better to come.
On top of already exhausting lives, the workers of the Fight for $15 movement have spent countless hours organizing for a better deal. They want, as Henry Scott, a Fight for $15 worker and member of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, told me recently, a decent wage so they can have time with their families and realize some of the value they’ve created for massively profitable corporations—many of which have seen their profits increase during the pandemic.
After the Senate vote, the national Fight for $15 campaign, backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), sent out a statement from Chicago worker Adriana Alvarez. “The Senate’s vote failed working people. Essential workers throughout our country—including thirty-two million who desperately need a raise to $15 an hour—have been promised, time and time again, that help is on the way,” the statement read. “[T]he party in power refuses to stand united behind $15 an hour, the bare minimum anyone needs to survive.”
The same wage erosion that happened to the real minimum wage has of course also happened to $15 in the time since I met Pamela Flood on that picket line in 2012. $15 is not a living wage in most of the country. Alvarez is correct that $15 is the bare minimum.
What happens when work doesn’t pay for years and years on end? What happens to people who were raised on the doctrine of working hard but find that the reality is very different? How long can people continue to live this way—particularly when so many of those same workers, people like Alvarez and Scott and Flood, have been told for a year now that they are “essential” workers, that their presence on the fry station, the delivery apps, the grocery checkout line, is necessary for our survival, but their own survival continues so clearly to not matter.
How long can we expect those essential workers to keep trying?
The fight to raise the minimum wage is not over. Sanders told reporters, “If anybody thinks that we’re giving up on this issue, they are sorely mistaken. If we have to vote on it time and time again, we will—and we’re going to succeed.” Biden’s communications staff has said the President remains “committed” to $15. And Alverez is prepared to hold him to it: “We refuse to accept excuses. President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Congress must find a way to get $15 done.”