As the few dozen or so demonstrators milled about under a moderate drizzle on the grassy buffer between St. Petersburg’s 62nd Avenue North and a McDonald’s franchise, a man in an SUV, fresh from the drive-thru, asked one of the protesters what was going on.
An activist with the Fight for $15 movement told him they were calling for a minimum wage of $15 an hour, and a handful of local politicians, all Democrats, were there to support them.
The driver spouted back that fast-food workers don’t deserve that kind of money.
Arguing ensued for a minute or so — like a real-life political argument among strangers on social media — before he sped off.
The aptly named Fight for $15 movement holds events outside heavily trafficked franchises such as the St. Pete McDonald’s store almost weekly in metro areas across the country, and has picketed outside the company’s Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters more than once.
Backed largely by the Service Employees International Union, events at first consisted primarily of hand-written sign-waving and chanting, with the occasional march down a major thoroughfare.
In the couple of years since it started, the movement expanded beyond fast food workers, picking up child care workers, nurses’ assistants, home care workers and even adjunct faculty at colleges and universities who, despite having earned master’s degrees and PhDs, can still make under $10 an hour.
Now the movement holds forums, press conferences and roundtable discussions with high-level candidates, Hillary Clinton among them.
At a roundtable event in Tampa recently, Central Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, a candidate for U.S. Senate, told a group of workers that he’d back a bill increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. That bill was sponsored by Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison.
“People deserve to make a fair day’s living from a fair day’s work,” he told the small group. “You all are people [with] principles and high… standards in what you do. You have a lot of pride in your work.”
It would obviously be naive to think a bill more than doubling the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage would have a chance at passing in the current political climate. It’s a time when the Republican message of bootstraps (narrowly) dominates, a time when states like Florida have even barred cities and counties from setting their own minimum wages, except for local government workers.
But given the traction the movement has been gaining, Grayson said that in addition to being the right thing to do (not to mention cheaper for the government in the long run), the effort can also help mobilize voters in support of candidates who do support a drastic wage increase — namely Democrats.
“We hear a lot about wedge issues,” he said. “Shouldn’t this be a wedge issue for us? Shouldn’t fair pay — that means you don’t have to rely on government handouts if you work full time — shouldn’t that be a wedge issue for us? Maybe it will be.”
Republicans and Democrats have been garnering votes by parading wedge issues for years, most notably (and successfully) on abortion and gun control. The GOP has attracted voters in whose interest it might not necessarily be to vote Republican, given the party’s economic policies, by sparking outrage over abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues.
So bringing the minimum wage front and center among potential Democratic voters going into 2016 could be a game-changer, assuming the timing is good and Fight for $15 and its supporters can successfully turn minimum wage into a moral issue.
“I think it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican,” said Eric Lynn, a Democrat running for Pinellas County’s 13th Congressional District seat. “If you’re opposed to raising the minimum wage and allowing the people of Florida to have a minimum wage, then you shouldn’t be elected.”
Lynn was among a handful of local politicians who pledged to take the “minimum wage challenge,” starting Sept. 28. It entails living on Florida’s minimum wage — $8.05 an hour — for a week.
It’ll be tough, given that he and his wife have two children.
“What my wife and I looked at is how we’re going to live on $300 a week for ourselves, and it’s going to be very, very difficult, particularly because my son’s birthday is on Friday,” he said. “We actually had a family trip planned to the toy store on Thursday, so now we’re thinking if we’re going to go to the toy store, we’re literally not going to have any money left for food, to be able to live on.”
He added that he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to spend years living like that.
The Monday press conference announcing the minimum wage challenge attracted multiple media outlets, suggesting more interest in the wage conversation than there had been in the past.
Activists like Bleu Rainer, a fast-food worker who has been a vocal advocate for a $15 minimum wage, said he hopes the movement’s visibility will help inspire more underprivileged people to get on the voter rolls, especially since the movement’s message has expanded beyond fast food workers.
“We’ve been engaging the public,” he said. “We’re now moving out of just fast food, child care, home care, [adjunct faculty]. We’re moving out into the community perspective… We’re getting people in these communities that aren’t registered to vote, or really don’t know about candidates to vote for them.”
“Is it a smart strategy for Democrats to utilize right now, and start going on it?” said University of South Florida political analyst Susan MacManus. “Yes, it is.”
But there are some potential pitfalls for the movement.
For one, it has to keep its momentum for more than a year in a time when attention spans tend to be short, and few actually start thinking about who to vote for until right before the election.
“People who are not political junkies often don’t pay that much attention to issues until closer to an election,” MacManus said.
The economy is also a factor.
“The power of the issue is an interface between the status of the economy at the time getting close to the election and its utility as a turnout mechanism for people who would be benefiting from a higher minimum wage,” she said.
So, while those who want a minimum wage on which anyone can survive want to see people do well, their movement might lose momentum if an improving economy suddenly sparks prosperity among everyone, including traditionally impoverished communities — not that it would.
“In Florida we have 1.7 million people in poverty, which is almost one in 10 Floridians,” Lynn said. “So I think it’s a huge issue for the election in 2016.”
A recent Brookings Institute analysis of census data suggests that, even though the economy grew as we came out of the Great Recession, so, too, did poverty in some areas, including Tampa Bay and statewide.
The region’s poor population is by no means the largest in the state or nation, but its size is growing as that of many other areas is shrinking, reported the Tampa Bay Times’s Michael Van Sickler. In the last 14 years, the number of people living in poverty in the Tampa Bay area has gone from 252,429 to 453,051 — an increase of about 50 percent.
The number of poor people grew by 10 million nationwide, Van Sickler notes. It wouldn’t be going too far out on a limb to surmise that some of that probably has to do with wage stagnation, or, as in the case of some college instructors, decline.
That means more people relying on government assistance, or, in some cases, turning to crime to survive.
Generally, the GOP says it wants to attack the problem by enticing businesses to the state with tax breaks and other perks that make it cheaper to do business here, and several companies have moved headquarters, mostly regional, to the state, bringing scores of jobs with them. But apparently, if the census data is to be believed, it’s had little impact on poverty.
So, if Fight for $15 and the Democrats who endorse it can effectively make their case that the opposition’s plan for eradicating poverty isn’t working — and articulate how this happened partially under the watch of a Democratic president — they may have something to go on.
Unless, of course, after years of broken candidate promises, disillusionment with politics wins.
“For somebody to be swayed by it, they have to believe that the people who are espousing it are going to actually do something about it,” MacManus said. “Of course right now, trust level of people in general toward politicians doing what they say is pretty low. But that may change by Election Day, too, when people are more hopeful that somebody really means what they say.”
Another hurdle for the movement — and its message to voters — is that the ask is somewhat extreme, the perception that $15 an hour is far too much for jobs with little or no education requirement. The White House has said $10.10 would suffice as a federal minimum wage, and cities and states can adjust theirs upward in accordance with cost of living, as cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York State — places Grayson calls “enlightened” — have already done, bringing theirs to $15.
Rainer maintains that the movement focused on $15 (which would rise with inflation) because it would put the minimum wage in line with what it was, in terms of proportion, decades ago. Instead of racking up insurmountable debt, those at that income level could have a (small) amount of income that could be applied to savings or education.
“I’d like to see people who work 40 hours a week elevated to the point where at least they don’t have to get food stamps, where they don’t have to get Medicaid, where they don’t have to get the working tax credit,” Grayson said. “These are things that we do, basically, to subsidize corporations who are exploiting their work force.”
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2015.