How a $15 Minimum Wage Went From Fringe to Mainstream

[Purveyor]

The union-backed campaign for $15 just scored a huge win in California and may get another in New York.

BY Josh Eidelson

By 2020 there will be a $15 minimum wage in effect for fast-food workers in New York City, for employees of large companies in Seattle, and for all workers in Los Angeles. On March 28, California Governor Jerry Brown announced a deal to make the $15 wage standard throughout the state by 2022. Last year, Democrats in Congress proposed making it the national starting wage, replacing the $7.25 federal minimum that prevails today.

None of that would have been possible without the union-conceived Fight for $15, a four-year-old effort that’s been organized labor’s most effective political campaign in recent memory. “On the political level, it’s definitely working,” says Vincent Vernuccio, who directs labor policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based free-market think tank. The Fight for $15 was the brainchild of the Service Employees International Union, the second-largest in the U.S., many of whose 1.9 million members work for local or state government or in taxpayer-funded health-care jobs. Since 2012, SEIU has sunk millions of dollars into the Fight for $15 to pressure fast-food corporations to allow unionization, lobby elected officials to pass higher wage laws, and support worker walkouts and mass demonstrations.

SEIU’s president, Mary Kay Henry, is gambling that the Fight for $15 will help save her union. She says increasing standards for the worst-paid workers is bolstering her members’ efforts to win bigger raises. SEIU leaders also believe pressure on fast-food corporations will eventually yield a deal that covers millions of workers, improves their lives, and includes a funding mechanism for the campaign to continue—even if the result doesn’t look like a traditional union. “We bargain in the way we know how,” Henry says. “We’re also taking risks in building a movement that’s going to birth the next form of worker power.”

Unions are in a weaker position today than they’ve been in decades. In February, West Virginia became the fourth state in as many years to pass a law letting workers in the private sector opt out of paying union fees, even if they’re covered by union-negotiated contracts. A 2014 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court banned mandatory union fees for Medicaid-funded home-health aides, SEIU’s fastest-growing membership group.

On March 29, the court issued a split 4-4 ruling in a case challenging mandatory union fees for public-sector workers covered by union contracts. The deadlock leaves current rules allowing such fees intact, but at least one other challenge has already been filed in a lower court. That means the Supreme Court may choose to revisit the question after the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia is filled. Losing mandatory fees, unions say, would drive their share of the U.S. workforce below today’s 11 percent, down from about one-third 50 years ago. “We can’t survive in a world where the oxygen is being cut off,” says Larry Hanley, president of the 190,000-member Amalgamated Transit Union.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-29/how-a-15-minimum-wage-went-from-fringe-to-mainstream