The New York Times' fight for a hike in the minimum wage to an economically dubious $15 an hour (and its related obsession with "income inequality") long bubbling on the paper's Business pages, boiled over onto Thursday's front page in a story by Noam Scheiber, the day after nationwide protests against fast-food companies by left-wing activists in favor of the far-higher minimum wage. An earlier Schieber story had challenged Hillary Clinton on the issue from the left, insisting she must embrace the $15 figure or risk losing "progressive" support.
The protest by tens of thousands of low-wage workers, students and activists in more than 200 American cities on Wednesday is the most striking effort to date in a two-and-a-half-year-old labor-backed movement that is testing the ability of unions to succeed in an economy populated by easily replaceable service sector workers.
Labor has invested tens of millions of dollars in a campaign for a $15-an-hour minimum wage that goes beyond traditional workplace organizing, taking on a cause that has captured broad public support. But the movement is up against a hostile business sector sheltered by a decades-old federal labor law that makes it difficult for workers to directly confront the wealthy corporations that dominate the fast-food and hospitality industries.
For political activists looking to the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, the wage fight is coming at a potentially pivotal moment, the first concrete, large-scale challenge in decades to an economic system they view as skewed toward the wealthy.
"There is a huge upswelling of anger around jobs in this economy that are low-wage jobs,” said Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change, a grass-roots organizing group that has played a key role in both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the current fast-food workers’ campaign. “This economy we’re living in now doesn’t work for people.”
For "grass-roots," substitute "far-left."
A noon rally in front of a McDonald’s restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side attracted throngs of protesters, many of them carrying signs that read “Why Poverty?” and “We See Greed.” They included fast-food workers, laundry workers, carwash employees and sympathetic bystanders.
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The protests have coincided with an extraordinary shift in the political consensus on the minimum wage. In the last two years, Seattle has moved to gradually increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour, from $9.32. Oakland, Calif., established a new minimum wage of $12.25, while Chicago approved an increase to $13, from $8.25, over the next four years. Alaska and Arkansas passed minimum wage increases by referendum in 2014.
Schieber, a former senior editor at the liberal New Republic magazine, made a brief injection of economic reality before continuing the cheerleading.
But business groups argue that a substantially higher increase would force employers to reduce hiring, accelerate automation and even threaten the basic economic model of some industries.
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At the same time, public opinion was shifting. According to the General Social Survey, regarded by researchers as the gold standard in public opinion data, the share of Americans who agreed that “inequality continues to exist because it benefits the rich and powerful” spiked by more than 10 points from 2010 to 2012, to over 60 percent.
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Even politically moderate voters appear to believe that it is the responsibility of corporations to mitigate the problem. In her own preliminary surveys, Professor McCall found that, when asked to choose who should be most responsible for reducing inequality -- the poor, the rich, the government, major companies, or that it did not need to be reduced -- a plurality of Republican respondents, about 37 percent, chose “major companies.”
Thursday's edition also featured an accompanying hopeful editorial, "A New Day for the Minimum Wage?"
Scheiber also made the front of the April 14 Business section, hitting Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton from the left: "Minimum-Wage Effort Tests Clinton on Economic Policy."
The grass-roots energy building around the minimum wage issue may upend Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plans to ease into proposing specific economic policies.
The issue will be in the foreground on Wednesday, when fast-food and other low-wage workers plan a nationwide walkout that is expected to draw tens of thousands of people to rally support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The protest is the latest show of strength by the Fight for $15, a campaign that economists partly credit with the recent decisions by employers like Walmart and McDonald’s to raise the minimum wage they pay workers.
The daylong strike may provide the first test for the campaign at managing the desire of voters and party activists for an aggressive approach to mitigating income inequality. Mrs. Clinton said that she was running for president because “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” but she has offered few details about how to bridge that gap.
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With a recent accumulation of economic literature suggesting that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little to no cost when it comes to employment, opposition even among economists in the business world has begun to melt. Last Thursday, the economic research department of Goldman Sachs, which is widely followed by policy makers, released an analysis of minimum wage increases that made no allusion to possible job losses.
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Even Republicans, whose party has long been skeptical of the minimum wage, have begun to soften their opposition. “I’m not for repealing the minimum wage,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said at a candidate forum in January. “But I can tell you, I don’t want people to make $10.10 an hour. I want them to make $30 an hour.”
Scheiber eventually admitted that:
Even progressive economists argue that some caution is merited. Mr. Bernstein, a supporter of a substantial minimum wage increase with a reputation as being the Obama White House’s most liberal in-house economist, said that $15 an hour gave him pause because it was “out of sample.” That is, there was no precedent to demonstrate it wouldn’t cost jobs.
But he still advised full-steam ahead for Hillary Clinton on the issue and warned her against showing any hesitation about embracing this left-wing economic idea.
The question of speed, though, may be especially sensitive for Mrs. Clinton.
She may ultimately align with her party’s base on many economic issues. But any reluctance by Mrs. Clinton to say whether she explicitly supports the goals of the Fight for $15 campaign -- or even how far toward them she would hope to come as president -- could curb enthusiasm for her candidacy among progressives and low-income workers at the very moment she’s officially engaged.
Mrs. Clinton, after all, promised in her announcement that she wanted to be a champion for “everyday Americans.” She pledged to labor on their behalf “so that you can do more than just get by. You can get ahead, and stay ahead.”
