California and New York just passed a statewide $15 minimum wage, effective 2022. And Fight for 15 protestors in more than 300 cities demanded the same when they mobilized April 14.
Questions on whether businesses can afford to pay their workers more aside, is that pay even enough to support workers and their families?
Where Do You Live?
Not in all states, some say. In fact, if you consider the Alliance for a Just Society‘s numbers, $15 isn’t enough to get by in more than half the states in the US, especially for workers with families.
Nationally, the living wage is closer to $16.87 for someone working full time, they say, which fluctuates according to each state.
The Alliance defines a living wage as “one that allows families to meet their basic needs, without public assistance, and that provides them some ability to deal with emergencies and plan ahead. It is not a poverty or survival wage.”
Of course, as Dylan Petrohilos notes in ThinkProgress, that cost of living estimate has some cushion. While different calculations consider a studio apartment as the bare minimum for housing, the Alliance factors in rent for a one-bedroom space.
Furthermore, Petrohilos writes, “Though $15 may sound high, the minimum wage would be at $22.62 if it had kept up with the income gains of the top one percent. Raising the minimum wage to $22 would increase the price of a Big Mac by about a dollar.”
Who’s Affected?
Now, the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised from $7.25 since 2009, and the wage minimum for tipped employees has stayed at $2.13 for over a decade.
A total three million workers make this federal minimum wage nationwide, with 20.6 million others following close behind by earning less than $10.10 an hour.
Fast food workers are among this low-wage class. They make an average of $8.94 an hour.
To live in Chicago on this wage, for instance, a worker’s annual income of $18,595 would be over the national poverty line for a family of two, but nowhere near secure….