That small amount of money didn’t cover her bills and expenses. “So then I just ended up working more,” she explained. She would work six or even seven days a week just to try to make ends meet. “I would just go to sleep and then go to work and then go to sleep and go to work,” she said. She spent three years putting in those kinds of hours. “I felt totally exhausted, physically and mentally.”

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She eventually started working in a different salon in Manhattan where she made slightly more: $50-60 a day for the same hours. It still wasn’t enough to cover her bills. She had to eat “the most basic things,” always at home because she couldn’t afford to eat a meal out. She couldn’t buy herself anything, not even new clothes. “I couldn’t take care of my physical and mental health,” she said.

“You’re working so hard, but at the end of the week you still don’t have enough,” she added. “It makes it impossible to imagine a dignified life.”

Meanwhile, the salon owners never gave her and her coworkers information about how to protect their health and safety when working with chemicals everyday. Salon workers are routinely exposed to the “toxic trio” of formaldehyde, toluene, and dibutyl phthalate, common nail polish ingredients, as well as disinfectants such as alcohol. Exposure can lead to skin irritation and chronic conditions, allergies, and even reproductive problems.

Sefla didn’t realize that she had the right to more pay and better protection until she found the New York Nail Salon Workers Association, which organizes nail salon workers in the state around wages and working conditions. She’s now an organizer there.

“This wasn’t just something that was just happening to me,” she noted. For all of her compañeras in the industry, “This is the reality that we’re living.”

A new report backs her up. In a survey of about 100 nail salon workers in New York City and surrounding counties, the New York Nail Salon Workers Association found that 82 percent experienced wage theft. Employers are failing to pay the state’s tipped minimum wage, aren’t making up the difference when employees’ base wages and tips don’t add up to the full minimum wage, and don’t pay extra for overtime work. The hours are long: nearly two-thirds of nail salon employees say they work shifts that are at least 10 hours. But many aren’t paid time and a half for the extra hours they put in.

That wage theft is costing them, on average, more than $180 a week, or over $9,000 a year—steep sums for the majority immigrant female workers who survive off of little pay to begin with. More than 10 percent of respondents were losing more than $400 a week.

One source of the problem, the report finds, can be traced back to how little it costs to get a manicure in New York. Workers at salons that charge the lowest prices—$9 or less for a manicure—reported experiencing higher rates of wage theft and losing more money, while those at salons that charged at least $16 for a manicure kept more of the money they were due. “Low prices translate into illegal poverty wages,” the report states. But “as service prices increase, wage theft decreases.”

On top of the inadequate pay, the report also found that 86 percent of nail salon workers in New York City aren’t being given paid sick days, as is the law.

In 2015, a New York Times expose shone a light on the rampant mistreatment of nail salon employees in the city, who are often forced to work extremely long hours in harsh conditions for little pay. In its wake, the state implemented health and safety standards dealing with ventilation and protective equipment. It also now requires owners to take financial steps to ensure that workers can recover wages if it’s found they’re being underpaid and created a voluntary recognition process for those deploying best practices. But workers argue that even with some protections in place, they need stronger enforcement to get what they’re due. “While the legislation provided new protections for workers and regulations for employers, workers continue to organize to make those protections a reality,” the report notes.

“We still aren’t really seeing changes,” Sefla said. “We have established better laws, but we’re seeing that a lot of the owners are not complying with the new laws. So we haven’t seen the change that we’re looking for.”

In December, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he would get phase out the tipped minimum wage for a group of workers that includes nail salon employees (although excluded restaurant and hospitality workers), meaning salon owners will be required to pay the full minimum wage regardless of how much customers tip. But as the report notes, many workers weren’t even being paid the lower tipped wage to begin with. So they’re demanding more legislative action.

“We need mechanisms for enforcing those established laws,” Sefla said. “There won’t be any change without consequences and accountability.”

The heart of their demand is that the state legislature pass the Nail Salon Accountability Act, which will be introduced later this month. The law would change the licensing process so that workers’ feedback would be incorporated into the renewal process and owners would have to get certification proving that they are complying with labor, health, and safety laws. It would also mandate training for owners and workers on those laws. “Compliance with the law must become part of the cost of doing business,” the report states.

There are other potential legislative fixes in the works as well. Members of the assembly are considering a bill that would criminalize wage theft. The New York City council is working on a bill that would give salon owners subsidies so they could add proper ventilation.

“Esos son básicos,” Sefla said: These are basic things. “Son derechos que tenemos aquí en este país.” These are rights we have here in this country.

But when cities and states take action to raise wages, they often ignore a pretty obvious problem: across most of the country, employers routinely skirt paying the minimum wage, overtime wages, or contractually promised wages, with little fear of facing consequences.

When the Broken Laws study surveyed 4,387 workers in 2008 across Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York in low-wage industries like hospitality and domestic care, they found that 44 percent had been paid less than the law required within the past year. In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that employers steal $15 billion annually from workers by paying less than the minimum wage.

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Two basic facts add up to create an environment where wage thieves operate with impunity. The first is that most wage thieves will never be caught. Workers often fear retaliation for speaking up or don’t have the resources they’d need to file a complaint or bring a lawsuit. And only a handful of local or state wage theft enforcement agencies have demonstrated an effective strategy for tracking down wage thieves, explaining why in places like Houston, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina, a typical year might only bring a single successful wage theft prosecution.

The second is that even when wage thieves are caught, our legal system protects business owners at the expense of workers: wealthy individuals and profitable companies get ample opportunity to claim they just don’t have the money to pay workers what they’re owed. A 15-state investigation by Politico found that workers who won their wage theft lawsuits only ultimately recovered 59 percent of the money that judges or juries had agreed they’d been owed. In New York City, ten delivery workers won a $700,000 wage theft ruling against the restaurant Indus Valley — although these workers started their complaint in 2008 and won their lawsuit before a federal judge in 2014, they say they’ve collected only about 15 percent of what they’re owed.

These are both solvable problems if we’re willing to change a legal and economic system that stacks the deck against working people.

Catching Wage Thieves In the Act

Workers know complaining about unpaid or underpaid hours can mean risking their jobs or getting shunted into a less favorable schedule. According to a 2019 report by the National Employment Law Project, 45 states lack one or more of the provisions of an effective anti-retaliation law.

Undocumented workers are especially vulnerable to retaliation. Speaking about undocumented workers in Houston, Texas, Josef Buenker, a private employment lawyer, said, “I can’t count the number of times workers have told us that that it’s an overt threat used against them, [when bosses say] ‘I’m going to report you to ICE, what are you going to do about it?’” He added, “We regularly meet with people who want to pursue their claim, but then they go home and think about it and decide not to because they’re concerned about their immigration status.” As long as the threat of deportation can be used against workers, wage theft will persist. Aggressive deportation policies undermine labor conditions for both immigrants and for their U.S.-born coworkers, whose bargaining power is undermined by their bosses’ ability to exploit those without papers.

The cost of going to court is another key consideration. Some workers are able to find free legal counsel from a local legal services agency, but these agencies are stretched thin, forced to choose between helping people in poverty avoid eviction, fight wrongful debt collection lawsuits, win wage theft cases, and gain protection from domestic violence. A worker making more than $15,000 per year is often totally ineligible for legal services aid.

Some legal aid organizations lack the funding to take on wage theft cases at all. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, there are two organizations providing civil representation to low-income workers, the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy and Legal Aid of North Carolina, explained Ken Schorr, Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy’s executive director, and he noted that neither organization will represent low-income workers in court for wage theft cases. Schorr explained, “The majority of our funding is grant-based for particular areas.” He added, “We haven’t been able to find funding to do employment law based work such as wage claims.” Our country considers legal representation in civil cases a privilege, not a right — which means many low-wage workers can’t use the court system to hold their employers accountable.

That’s why, as Tallulah Knopp, a staff attorney at Boston’s Volunteer Lawyer Project, points out, it’s so important for states to have clear “fee-shifting” statutes: in many states, when a worker wins a wage theft lawsuit, the employer will have to pay their back wages, but not necessarily their legal fees. A strong “fee-shifting” statute, like Massachusetts’, sets a standard where, if a worker wins their case, their employer pays the legal fees, instead of the worker having to pay the lawyer out of their recovered damages. That encourages private lawyers to come to the table on behalf of workers, Knopp explains. In a state like Texas, where filing fees are $400, and many attorneys bill at $100 per hour or more, there’s no real way to get your wages back if you’re owed just $500. That’s why Knopp and Nick Wertsch, of Texas’ Workers Defense Project, both point to fee-shifting statutes as a critical part of fighting wage theft.

But Jennifer Lee, associate professor at Temple Law School, argues that relying on workers to come forward against their bosses can’t solve wage theft by itself, even in the presence of fee-shifting.

As Lee explains, the information barriers and risks for workers to report their own wage theft remain high, even when states try to protect workers from retaliation. “The number of workers who are suffering violations versus the number of people who come forward is miniscule,” says Lee.

After investigating 141 state and local anti-wage-theft laws, she concluded that we can’t rely on workers to file complaints or lawsuits: while a worker’s “private right of action” can be part of the solution, we also need strong wage theft enforcement agencies that don’t just react to workers’ complaints, but are on the lookout for abuse.

Funding is part of the problem in some cities and states, says Lee, but she also points to cities whose enforcement agencies are dramatically underutilized. Many agencies, Lee says, wait for workers to file complaints, rather than entering the community to inform workers of their rights, and to find bad actors.

The most promising approach, says Lee, is collaboration between government agencies and workers’ centers. Although workers in the industries susceptible to wage theft often aren’t unionized, many are organized through local worker’s centers like the Domestic Worker & Day Laborer Center of Chicago and Houston’s Fe y Justicia. “Agencies aren’t always in the best position to identify which workplaces have issues or to build trust with workers,” says Lee, adding that worker’s centers are often more embedded in the community. The cooperation of worker’s centers gathers useful information about labor conditions and can encourage more workers to come forward. Lee pointed to Seattle as an example of a city that has effectively partnered with local community groups — their Office of Labor Standards selected ten community organizations to receive $1 million contracts to provide education and outreach to workers. Reporting by the Philadelphia Enquirer found that, in 2018, Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards received 10 times the number of wage theft questions and complaints than Philadelphia received, a larger city that lacked such a strategy.

Making Them Pay the Bill 

But even once wage theft is brought to light, workers don’t always get paid. Across the country, nominally “successful” wage theft lawsuits often result in empty judgments: just because a judge or jury agreed that a worker experienced wage theft, it doesn’t always mean that the worker will be able to collect her back wages.

A report by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice found at least $125 million in unpaid wage theft judgments and orders within New York City alone. Carmela Huang, a supervising attorney at New York City’s Legal Aid Society, says “it’s just far too easy for employers to transfer their assets.” As an example, Huang explains, a restaurant owner faced with a high-dollar wage theft lawsuit will recruit a friend to create a new corporation and transfer the restaurant to the new corporation. That makes the original corporation facing the lawsuit nominally unable to pay its wage debts. “For more than a decade employer-side attorneys have been advising clients on how to hide their assets — it is definitely a part of the practice to advise clients on how to make themselves judgment-proof,” says Huang. That’s why the Legal Aid Society called on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign the SWEAT Act, which would have allowed workers to place a lien on their employers’ assets while wage theft litigation was ongoing, stopping bad companies from using suspicious transfers to hide assets. Cuomo vetoed the SWEAT Act on January 2.

Our country arrests 1.5 million people for burglary and larceny per year — but workers facing stolen wages are routinely deprived of justice. Businesses can dial 911 and expect the cops to show up to arrest a shoplifter, while millions of Americans work for poverty wages, as victims of theft from their employers, with little hope of recourse. To end wage theft, we should lift the threat of deportation, guarantee workers access to the legal system, build strong wage theft enforcement agencies, and close the loopholes that allow employers to shirk responsibility to pay owed wages.

#PayUpHollywood is an initiative spearheaded by Writers Guild of America (WGA) board member (and former Hollywood assistant) Liz Alper and Dierdre Mangan, supported by a number of my IATSE 871 union sisters, including Amy Thurlow, Debbie Ezer, Jessica Kivnik, and Olga Lexell. The hashtag has sparked a discussion of the low pay and long hours that assistants have long endured as “paying their dues.”

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#PayUpHollywood has made a lot of noise on social media, exposing widespread workplace issues that plague Hollywood assistants. In addition to stagnant wages, assistants are discussing working unpaid holidays, being pressured not to report overtime, paying for staff lunch overages out of pocket, eating personal computer and software costs, struggling with student loan debt, a lack of sick leave, and other egregious workplace problems.

When you set about breaking into Hollywood, you usually take a job as a production assistant. From there, you specialize, becoming a wardrobe assistant, camera assistant, casting assistant, or, like me, a writers’ assistant. Behind every red-carpet gala, behind every award-winning close-up, behind every pulse-pounding action sequence, there is an army of us.

All have a couple things in common: We desperately want to make it in our chosen trades and we don’t make very much money. Television writers’ assistants make $14.57 an hour for a job that functionally requires a college degree. As Thurlow told Variety, “The issue really is that wages have been stagnant for so long that the gains we’ve made just aren’t enough in the face of cost-of-living increases.”

Writers’ assistants are the court stenographers of the TV world, responsible for capturing everything discussed on a daily basis and filtering it into notes that can become an outline that can become a television episode. Script coordinators are paid a couple bucks more ($16.63/hour) for the herculean task of ensuring that every version of every script is formatted correctly, typo free, and contains no names or brands that it shouldn’t.

If the writers’ assistant is the stenographer, the script coordinator is the on-call nurse. I say on-call because it is not unusual for them to be compelled to their computer at 3 a.m. after a new draft has been prepared on set in Toronto, Budapest, or Dubrovnik.

For decades, the expectation has been that people will toil away at these jobs for years as they build up the experience and connections necessary to become a writer. In theory, that may sound like a nice apprenticeship for a bright-eyed post-collegiate. In reality, this means that people in their late-twenties and thirties are making near minimum wage as they have children and put down roots in one of the most expensive cities in the world. A one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles costs an average of $1,360 per month.

These jobs require 60 hours a week or so for writers’ assistants and usually more for script coordinators. You are expected to develop your own writing in your spare time or you “must not really want it.” Many assistants work additional jobs, supplementing their income as Uber drivers and Starbucks baristas, along with 13 million other Americans.

Then there is the schmoozing that is required to rise up the ranks, which often involves a few craft cocktails a couple nights a week. After all, if you don’t have access to the influential alumni networks of Harvard or USC, you’ll have to cobble together your own group of allies if you ever want to make it in this town. Remember, it’s all about who you know.

While you’re at it, you might want to take some classes at UCB or UCLA Extension or enter your script into some contests to up your odds. That will cost you too. Oh, and have you thought about making a short film and submitting to festivals?

Women on #PayUpHollywood are discussing additional financial challenges they face in the chic world of Tinseltown. Thurlow told me: “I would also say needing to look cute and trendy, especially as a woman, is also a barrier. Everyone talks about how casual the industry is but there’s still a certain expectation. One job I had, my boss shamed me for using a tote bag instead of a proper work bag.

Breaking into Hollywood, it turns out, is very expensive.

There is a perception that this “dues paying” creates an environment where the hardest working and most talented rise to the top. The reality is that those who have the financial privilege to work a low wage job for years without being forced out by economic circumstances are more likely to get the elusive rewards. The  dirty open secret of Hollywood is that a lot of the survivors make it through the well-kept gates thanks to financial subsidies from their parents or well-off partners.

Caroline Hylton, a script coordinator, told me, “Most of the people who can afford to hang on are the ones whose parents are helping out, or footing the entire bill — and that’s rarely minorities, and certainly not anyone from a low-income background. Income inequality is where this problem starts. Diverse voices can’t all be the offspring of the privileged.”

Hollywood is set up to prevent the poor from breaking in. While Hollywood has been focusing on diversity fellowship initiatives (which, for what it’s worth, are great), the best way to change the look of white male Hollywood would be to remove the financial barriers to entry. Any study of poverty will tell you that it disproportionately impacts women and people of color.

One of the best ways to lower these financial barriers is unionization. For example, 75 percent of the members of my union — IATSE (The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) Local 871 — are women, but only 36 percent of staffed TV writers are women.

Not only do union members make more money than their non-union counterparts, but expanded benefits like health care can make the difference between keeping our head above water and drowning in debt. Writers’ assistants and script coordinators recently received some much needed relief. Last year, both crafts joined IATSE (The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) Local 871. Under our first contract, we won modest wage increases and many assistants got quality health care for the first time. More importantly, these assistants now have a safe space to discuss workplace issues and strategize improving working conditions.

Though 871 and other IATSE locals represent thousands of assistants in various departments, there are thousands more in need of union protection.

Of course, it is my hope that IATSE will organize every one of these workers, but American labor laws are stacked against workers who want to form a union. Corporations often stamp out unionization efforts through legal means — such as forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings with their boss — and even illegally firing workers for supporting a union. Moreover, Donald Trump’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — the agency that enforces U.S. labor laws — is making it harder for the workers to join together in unions and bargain for a fair contract.

High industry turnover makes organizing production assistants even more difficult since these workers jump on and off of productions, switch departments, get promotions, or simply leave the industry. But, hopefully, as more assistants unionize, we can fight for protections for the most vulnerable and precarious entertainment workers.

Though there is still a long way to go, we are making strides. The most valuable thing a union does is bring workers together. When we come together, workers see that what they’re experiencing isn’t specific to them. You aren’t a bad worker; you are in a bad system. You aren’t worthless; the system makes everyone feel that way. Once you get a taste of what solidarity looks like, you aren’t afraid to ask for more.

The expectation is that overworked and underpaid assistants will be adequately nourished by the promise of future success. But you can’t eat your dreams.

These days, he’s putting in around 60 hours a week, even though his contract says he’s supposed to work 50 hours and the payroll system only counts 40 hours a week for the purpose of accruing sick leave. His managers keep giving him more to do. “They just add and add and add,” he said. “There’s no way for us to get everything done.”

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While overall his pay is higher than it was when he was hourly thanks to bonuses, those bonuses aren’t guaranteed. In terms of guaranteed pay per hour, he’s making less: He estimates that right now, it averages out to about $8 an hour, whereas the people below him make $16 an hour. And so much intense work has taken a huge toll on him. “It wears you out to work this many hours,” he said. “I’ve blown out my knee, blown out my back. I’m almost on the brink of not being able to survive physically.”

Ahlgren isn’t eligible for overtime pay because the federal threshold of $23,660 to qualify has gone without an update for decades. And without extra overtime pay for his extra hours, he’s just keeping his head above water financially. “I don’t have really enough to survive or go to the doctor or plan for the future or anything like that,” he said.

Ahlgren may be able to look forward to some relief, however. At the beginning of June, the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries released a plan to update its own overtime threshold. It would ensure that any worker in the state who makes less than 2.5 times the minimum wage — by 2026, nearly $80,000 a year — will be owed overtime pay. About 400,000 people like Ahlgren are expected to be affected.

The state of Washington had to take matters into its own hands because efforts to increase the overtime threshold at the federal level have stalled. In 2016, the Obama administration updated federal overtime rules so those making $47,476 or less would be automatically covered, both hourly and salaried. It would have been updated every three years to keep up with wage growth thereafter, likely covering those making $51,000 by early 2020.

But the update was challenged in court and ultimately struck down. Rather than defend the Obama update, the Trump administration first did nothing, and then put forward its own proposed increase to $35,308 without any automatic updates. According to the Economic Policy Institute, it will cover 8.2 million fewer people than the Obama rule would eventually have.

In the wake of Trump’s weak federal action, a number of states have stepped into the breach, because, as with the minimum wage, federal overtime law is just a floor; states and localities can go higher if they choose.

“This is a standard that is really important to the vibrancy of the middle class, and it has dramatically eroded over time,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. The minimum wage raises pay and living standards for those at the very bottom, but overtime is “about the lower end of the middle class,” she said. The typical person impacted by it is the front-line supervisor in a fast food restaurant or retail store — a low-level manager who may be asked to put in 60 to 70 hours a week at no additional pay. Updating overtime therefore acts as a “companion standard” to increasing the minimum wage, she said.

Pennsylvania was the first to act when last year Gov. Tom Wolf (D) proposed raising the state’s threshold to $47,892 by 2022 and updating it automatically every three years after that. California and New York have also taken action: California‘s overtime threshold will cover everyone making less than $62,400 by 2023, while New York will raise it to $58,500 in New York City and phase it in at different rates for different parts of the state.

But Washington state has so far gone the furthest. “The Washington announcement is definitely the boldest,” said Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s a model for how states can take strong action to protect workers from the Trump overtime rollback. We hope it’ll spur more states.”Previously, about two-thirds of the salaried workforce had to be paid overtime when they worked more than 40 hours a week. Washington’s update would cover about 44 percent, Sonn said: “It’s really quite moderate historically because it wouldn’t fully restore overtime pay to the share that had it in the 1970s.”

One of the beneficiaries in Washington would be Sidney Kenney. When he started working at a residential service provider for developmentally disabled people in a salaried position, he was told the job would be 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. “Soon you find out that’s not true,” he said. He was required to always be on call, even on weekends, holidays, and vacations. It meant keeping his phone at the ready even when at the movies or in bed. “It changes how you live,” he said.

He once took a vacation to go to a friend’s wedding but found himself having to do work on the way there, during the wedding, and on the way home. Every time he put in those extra hours, he was paid the same. “It builds resentment,” he said. “You’re angry, you feel like you’ve been lied to, feel like you’ve been taken advantage of.”

So, he decided to move to an hourly position instead. “I loved the job I was doing,” he said. “However, I realized it was not a lifestyle I could continue or wanted to continue.” Now he has a set number of hours, and if he has to come in early or stay late, he’s paid for that extra time. “My days off are my days off,” he said. “I still get phone calls from work and I still get some text messages, but I don’t have to answer them.”

“Your time is invaluable,” he noted. “I can plan things, I can enjoy my time. It’s a crazy world and nothing’s promised, so what time I do have I want to enjoy.”

But he thinks if his state’s proposed overtime update goes into effect, almost all of the positions at his job will simply be made hourly to accommodate it. “I would have stayed in the same position if it were hourly,” he noted. “If they were to extend the same position I had … but in an hourly capacity, I would go back to it.”

Ahlgren doesn’t expect that being covered by overtime regulations would reduce his hours. But it will mean extra money for his extra work. “At least I would be able to go to the doctor and take of myself,” he said. “I would be able to plan for a future where I wouldn’t just have to do this forever.”

Other states may soon join in the action. Last week Massachusetts held a hearing on a bill that would increase its threshold to $64,000 by 2026. Colorado’s labor department kicked off a comment process for whether and by how much it should raise its overtime standards, which will continue through Aug. 15. And a bill has been introduced in Maine’s legislature to increase its threshold. There may be others just waiting in the wings: Sonn noted that 16 states filed objections to Trump’s overtime update. “That shows there’s a long list of states that think it’s not enough,” he said. “We may well see them acting in the future.”

Workers in Washington also hope their state can inspire others to act. “So many businesses have built their models around having these free workers,” Kenney noted. “It’s not right, it’s not ethical, and it’s not fair.”

“I’m just hoping more states follow suit,” he said.

If passed, the new federal bill would also have far-reaching consequences that aren’t widely touted — including helping address America’s growing retirement crisis.

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As of 2013, nearly one in five Americans age 55 to 64 had zero retirement savings or pension. The crisis is much more acute for lower-income Americans: While nearly nine in 10 families in the top fifth of the income distribution have retirement account savings, fewer than one in 10 families in the bottom fifth do.

It’s not surprising, then, that seniors increasingly rely on Social Security’s very modest benefits, which make up 90 percent or more of the income of nearly one in four seniors — a share that rises to more than six in 10 for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale.

The yawning gap between the high pay of the rich and the stagnant or declining pay of the working and middle class is a key driver of the crisis: According to the Urban Institute, rising wage inequality means that today’s 45-year-olds in the bottom fifth of the lifetime earnings distribution will have 3 percent less retirement income than today’s seniors, 25-year-olds will have 6 percent less, and 5-year-olds will have 13 percent less. Meanwhile, for the richest fifth, annual retirement income will rise over time.

The amount a worker can afford to save for retirement is tied to her earnings, and the Urban Institute researchers find that raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to just $12 — below the $15 Congressional Democrats have proposed — would offset nearly 60 percent of the retirement income lost by the bottom fifth of today’s 25-year-olds, and nearly 40 percent lost by today’s 5-year-olds.

The minimum-wage bill’s impact would be especially profound on workers of color — particularly black workers, a full 40 percent of whom would get a raise. Black workers are paid much lower wages than their white counterparts, with the typical full-time, year-round black male worker earning just 70 percent of what a white male worker earns, while black women make just 61 percent. They also face a much more severe retirement crisis, exacerbated by systematic inequalities that hamper saving, prevent wealth-building, and inhibit upward mobility. Black Americans who are nearing retirement age have only about 10 percent as much wealth as whites in the same age group. Social Security benefits made up at least 90 percent of income for 46 percent of black seniors, compared to 35 percent of whites.

The low-wage, low-quality jobs disproportionately held by workers of color don’t pay enough to make ends meet — much less save — nor do many offer the tax-preferenced retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) that help build wealth. As a consequence of shorter life expectancy and lack of resources, many black men will die before they are able to retire.

This raise is a decade overdue: In 2019, a worker earning $7.25 per hour will lose nearly $2,600 compared to 2009 — when the federal minimum wage last went up — because inflation has eroded the wage’s purchasing power. A $15 minimum wage would also lift millions of Americans out of poverty, dramatically reduce spending on public assistance programs, and improve infant health. In just the last five years, 22 states and Washington, DC, have increased their minimum wages, at little or no cost to government and without the job losses conservative pundits claim will result.

Americans get it: In every single state, voters say want their state’s minimum wage to be higher than it currently is. By passing the Raise the Wage Act, Congress would rightly give voters what they’re demanding, and help address the retirement crisis at the same time.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on Jan. 17, 2019. It has since been updated.

A loophole in the current minimum wage law allows employers to pay workers with disabilities a subminimum wage that’s even lower than the federal limit of $7.25 — in some cases, paying people as little as pennies per hour. In recent years, an estimated 420,000 individuals with disabilities have been paid an average of just $2.15 per hour.

The new bill would sunset the separate subminimum wage, immediately setting it at $4.25 and then gradually increasing it every year for the next six years until it is even with the minimum wage.

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Disability advocates have been pushing for this type of legislation for years. The subminimum wage was initially introduced in 1938 to encourage employers to hire veterans with disabilities — and has barely budged in the nearly 80 years since. Now, the Depression-era policy does far more harm than good. Partly as a result of these extremely low wages, workers with disabilities are nearly twice as likely to be economically insecure as workers without disabilities.

While some advocates argue that the subminimum wage offers workers a foot in the door of the labor market — paving the way to skill development, training, and an upward career trajectory — research shows that it exposes workers with disabilities to exploitation and seclusion. In 2016, phasing out the separate subminimum wage was a key recommendation of the Department of Labor’s advisory committee on employment among individuals with disabilities.

In its current form, the subminimum wage pigeon-holes workers into dead-end jobs — most often at sheltered workshops, where workers with disabilities are kept separate from other workers. It’s stigmatizing, sending the message that disabled individuals’ work is not as valuable as other individuals’ work. And it’s discriminatory, robbing workers with disabilities of the basic labor protections afforded to workers without disabilities and leaving them vulnerable to mistreatment and abuse. Senator Casey and others have introduced the Transformation to Competitive Employment Act, which would include a graduated phase out of these programs over six years and financial incentives to support current programs to move to a model of integrated employment at competitive wages. However, the Raise the Wage Act is notable for finally treating these workers as a key part of the workforce from the outset.

Congressional Democrats’ embrace of one fair minimum wage taps into a growing — but so far, largely frustrated — movement. President Obama attempted to partially rectify the law by including workers with disabilities in his 2014 executive order mandating a minimum wage of $10.10 for federal contractors, which President Trump has threatened to reverse. At least six states, New Hampshire, Alaska, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, and Vermont have independently passed legislation to phase out the subminimum wage for workers with disabilities. Other subminimum wages, like the one that exists for tipped workers, have been able to make more progress.  Eight states ban the tipped minimum wage, and all national minimum wage bills introduced since 2012 have included provisions to partially or fully phase it out.

For the 40 million workers who struggle to make ends meet on low wages, the Raise the Wage Act is an historic step towards ensuring a livable wage for all. This call is especially significant for the millions of workers with disabilities who — after 80 years of being left without a voice in federal legislation — are finally able to join the chorus, demanding the fair shot at fair pay that all workers deserve.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on May 18, 2017. It has since been updated

Here’s the tl;dr:

A first bill, introduced at the end of January by Sen. Bob Casey, and Reps. Bobby Scott and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, would phase out section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which has made it legal for employers to pay disabled workers as little as pennies per hour. It would also provide resources to help these workers transition into competitive, integrated employment in their communities.

Second, Congressional Democrats’ $15 federal minimum wage bill, the Raise the Wage Act — introduced in mid-January by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Bobby Scott with the backing of the full Democratic leadership — would also eliminate the subminimum wage for workers with disabilities and phase out the separate subminimum wage for tipped workers, which is currently $2.13 per hour.

In the first week of February, Sen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Raúl Grijalva introduced the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, which would extend time-and-a-half overtime pay to agricultural workers, as well as minimum-wage protections to most agricultural workers who still lack them.

Finally, Sen. Harris and Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently announced the first-ever federal domestic workers’ bill of rights, which would give the nation’s more than 2 million home care workers long-denied rights to overtime pay, safety and health protections, recourse against harassment and discrimination, collective bargaining, and more.

This legislation is designed to chip away at several pernicious “-isms” written into the United States’ labor law — racism, sexism, and ableism.

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Many labor carve-outs are the direct legacy of slavery: At the urging of Southern lawmakers determined to maintain a white economic and social hierarchy, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) — which established some of our most basic worker protections like the rights to form a union, earn a minimum wage, and receive overtime pay — cut out domestic and agricultural workers, who were overwhelmingly black and brown. At the same time, the discriminatory practice of tipping — which had originally enabled American employers to avoid paying wages to newly-freed black workers — and treating disabled workers as inferior permanently codified some forms of labor as lower-than-minimum-wage work.

As a result, workers in these groups tend to have a lot less power than other workers. For starters, the pay isn’t enough to keep workers out of poverty even if they have a full time job: In recent years, the median annual wage has been roughly $23,000 for tipped workers*, home care workers, and agricultural workers, and an estimated 420,000 disabled workers employed in “sheltered workshops” created under 14(c) were paid an average of $2.15 per hour. These groups of workers are also disproportionately likely to endure physical and verbal abuse, sexual harassment, wage theft, discrimination, and dangerous working conditions.

Yet these unprotected jobs make up a large and growing swath of our economy: Caregiving is the fastest-growing major occupation in the United States, and is forecast to be one of the largest sectors by the end of the next decade, with more than 4.1 million workers employed as home health aides and personal care aides by 2026. The largest employer of tipped workers, the restaurant industry, accounts for 9.5 million workers, which is nearly seven percent of the U.S. workforce. Since these jobs are heavily dominated by women and workers of color, their devaluation perpetuates America’s already-deep inequalities on the basis of race, gender, and disability. The Trump administration has further endangered the many immigrant workers in these professions — who made up 24 percent of domestic workers and 76 percent of farm workers in recent years — by pushing anti-immigrant policies and using xenophobic language that make it even less likely that immigrant workers will seek recourse for illegal or inhumane treatment.

Opponents will likely break out the usual fearmongering that closing loopholes will harm rather than help workers by making it harder to find jobs, like we’ve recently seen in D.C., New Jersey, and Maine. The problem with their argument is simple: States have already enacted these policies and seen positive results. In the eight states where tipped workers are paid the full minimum wage, tipped workers earn more and restaurant growth has outpaced other states. States such as New Hampshire and Maryland are already phasing out the subminimum wage for disabled workers, while eight states and Seattle already have domestic workers’ bills of rights in place. And in several states, including agricultural powerhouses California and Minnesota, farm workers have won overtime protections.

Lawmakers’ proposed fixes are by no means perfect. Perhaps the most egregious untouched loophole affects America’s more than 800,000 incarcerated workers, who earn as little as a few cents per hour — or nothing at all — and for whom labor is compulsory in some states. Also excluded are the roughly 1 in 8 workers in so-called “alternative work arrangements,” including independent contractors (ICs) as well as workers whose employers misclassify them as ICs to avoid taxes and legal requirements, such as Uber and Lyft drivers. Still, even if they’re imperfect and eight decades overdue, the proposed fixes are an important steps forward.

It’s no accident that the champions of these efforts in Congress are largely women and people of color, who come from the communities that have borne the brunt of these exclusionary policies. And it’s encouraging that some lawmakers believe that in addition to big, bold ideas, being a true progressive leader involves unglamorous, piecemeal grunt work, such as plugging the longstanding leaks in the nation’s labor laws. As long as the loopholes continue to exist, the shameful “isms” that create our two-tiered society will continue to stare us down through the holes of our frayed worker protection system.

* The most recent analysis of tipped workers’ wages nationwide, by Sylvia Allegretto and David Cooper, uses 2011-2013 BLS data in 2013 dollars. We assume that median wages have grown at roughly the pace of inflation, adjusting to today’s dollars using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers.

This means the estimated 400,000 people with disabilities who are paid an average of $2.15 an hour will slowly gain access to jobs that pay the full minimum wage. That’s a big deal, especially to people like George, who used to work in a sheltered workshop run by Melwood, the company where Cari serves as president and CEO.

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George used to get nervous at work exactly twice a year. He’d held the same job providing cleaning services at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since 2008, but since Melwood was a sheltered workshop, George could be paid less than the minimum wage. The only way for him to avoid that was to test well at time trials held every six months. If he completed his work quickly enough, he was paid at a fixed rate. If he was too slow, he’d be paid a subminimum wage.

Today, we recognize that type of testing as cruel. But Melwood was established in 1963 by families who wanted to provide their children with developmental disabilities with opportunities to gain skills, have a vocation, and earn a wage. At the time, this was considered progressive — many people with disabilities ended up warehoused in institutions, and these families simply wanted to be able to keep them at home. But as disability policy has evolved, disabled people have been able to demand more — including access to jobs that pay well enough that workers can support themselves. Society changed, and programs like Melwood had to change with it.

In 2016, Melwood got on board. It relinquished the 14(c) certificate that classified it as a sheltered workshop and transitioned to paying all of its employees with disabilities competitive wages in integrated settings.

There were supports in place to make it work: The University Centers on Disability, Parent Training and Information Centers, and Protection and Advocacy Network all provide supports and services to help people move to integrated employment. Oregon and other states have demonstrated the ability for disabled workers to achieve successful outcomes transitioning to competitive integrated employment when state Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies and Intellectual/Developmental Disability Services work together.

In 2019, people with disabilities should not be facing futures with segregation and subminimum wages. They should be allowed to reach their full potential in a competitive integrated environment. They should earn a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Correction: This piece was updated to remove one of the original authors.

“Each year, every major league team has their minor league players report to spring training. Most fans don’t know those minor league players have to work 31 straight days for no pay,” said Garrett Broshius, a former minor league baseball player and current attorney who is attempting to sue Major League Baseball to ensure that minor leaguers receive fair pay for not only spring training, but all year round.

“If you’re requiring someone to work, you should be paying them the minimum wage. It’s a fairly basic principle,” he said.

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Low wages, though, are the reality for most minor league players. At the lowest end of the pay scale, they make about $1,150 per month during the season, which lasts about half the year, and receive nothing during the offseason or spring training, even though they are expected to stay in shape and train.

All that unpaid and low-paid time adds up; many players make about $7,500 annually, or even less. And because they spend so much time practicing, traveling, and playing games without being eligible for any sort of overtime pay, their hourly compensation dips far below minimum wage.

“I’d work 70 hours a week, and I would get paid $45 per game, so that comes out to like $3 an hour,” said Jeremy Wolf, a former minor league player who now runs More Than Baseball, an organization that aids minor leaguers. “The hot dog vendor makes more than the players do.”

This is possible because minor league baseball players are exempt from most minimum wage and overtime pay protections. A federal spending bill that averted a government shutdown in March 2018 included the positively Orwellian “Save America’s Pastime Act,” which explicitly exempted minor league baseball players from federal pay protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act, so long as they were paid the equivalent of the federal minimum wage of $7.25 for a 40-hour week, which comes out to about $1,160 per month. The bill also explicitly said players are only paid for 40 hours of work during the season  “irrespective of the number of hours the employee devotes to baseball related activities,” and that players don’t need to be paid for spring training or the off season.

Major League Baseball had been pushing for something like the “Save America’s Pastime Act” to become law for years, in order to blunt legal efforts such as Broshius’. After spending just half a million dollars or less annually on lobbying Congress between 2009 and 2015, Major League Baseball spent more than $1 million annually from 2016 to 2018.

Now the league is aiming to do the same thing at the state level, since states are allowed to exceed federal minimum wage and labor protections. At the behest of MLB,  Arizona Republican state Sen. T.J. Shope introduced a bill that would exempt minor league players from that state’s minimum wage law, which requires pay of $12 per hour by 2020, with few exceptions. He introduced it despite having clear misgivings about its legality, calling it “not ready for prime time.”

Not coincidentally, Arizona is one of the two states in which the bulk of spring training takes place (the other being Florida, where the state minimum wage is just $8.46 an hour). Broshius’ suit also brought claims under Arizona law, which the bill’s sponsor explicitly says would be undermined by his legislation.

“It’s just a preemptive strike by Major League Baseball,” said Wolf. “There a group of people that are just trying to cement not paying these employees.”

As Broshius explained, the month they work without pay in the spring can really hurt minor league players who don’t make it onto a major league roster — which entitles them to not only a minimum salary of more than $40,000 but also union protection — when they get shipped off to a new minor league team. “You go to a new place and you have to pay for your first month rent, put down a security deposit, a lot of players have student loans, and obviously you have your regular bills too,” he said.

Major League Baseball teams, not the minor league affiliates themselves, pay minor league players. They claim that paying fair wages to everyone in the minor league system would cause financial ruin, and also isn’t necessary because players have months of offseason in which they can work other jobs. Plus, they argue, minor league players are more akin to struggling actors going on auditions than daily workers who should receive steady pay.

“Their core argument is that it’s not practical to pay the players based on how long the games last or the hours they spent practicing because a minor league player isn’t doing it for a career, they’re doing it to see if [making it to the majors is] viable,” explained Lindsay Brandon, an attorney who specializes in sports law.

But, Brandon added: “Are these athletes generating revenue for these minor league teams? Absolutely.” The Texas Rangers, for instance, made $1.2 million from spring training last year. Brandon likened the case of minor league players to that of NCAA athletes, who are also attempting to earn a fair share of the revenue they generate. (Other professional sports leagues, such as the NBA or NHL, tend to pay their minor league players better.)

Compensating unpaid players for their month in spring training would amount to a rounding error for most major league teams. In fact, paying them at least minimum wage all year round would barely put a dent in the bottom line.

“If you give every player minimum wage for a 12-month season —  each team has 200 minor leaguers — each team raises their payroll by $4.5 million,” said Wolf. “$4.5 million is one average major leaguer.” Indeed, average pay in MLB in 2018 was about $4.5 million, while the league made $10.3 billion in revenue.

Why do minor leaguers put up with such shabby treatment? They don’t want to step out of line because they know that the dream of the majors, and its vast riches, is not that far away.

“I got to wear a Mets uniform. Players who are playing are blinded by that sort of thing,” said Wolf. “No one’s going to strike, no one’s going to scream union, no one’s going to do anything to make themselves stand out.”

So baseball gets to keep paying its players next to nothing, because it can.

Lawmakers initially passed the popular policies in September, after it became clear that ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2022, phase out the tipped minimum wage, and guarantee 72 hours of paid sick leave were likely to be approved if they were put to the state’s voters in November. Concerned that they’d be unable to overturn a ballot initiative, which would require a three-fourths supermajority, Republican legislators took the extraordinary step of passing the law themselves — so they could come back and dismantle it with a simple majority in the current lame duck session.

The new Republican bill delays the minimum wage increase by eight years, until the year 2030. Paid sick time is slashed in half, to just 36 hours per year. In addition, it maintains the tipped minimum wage, increasing it to just $4.58 by 2030, which earlier legislation would have phased out. The bill now heads to the desk of the outgoing Republican governor, Rick Snyder, who is expected to sign it into law.

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Outright subversion of democracy to defeat minimum wage hikes isn’t new. A similar series of events played out in Washington, D.C., just this year, when the supposedly progressive D.C. council repealed a ballot initiative to eliminate the tipped minimum wage just four months after the voters passed it. In Maine, lawmakers reinstated the tipped minimum wage in 2017 after voters eliminated it the year before.

It seems that the same lobbying group may have been behind the repeal of all three bills.

The National Restaurant Association, or NRA, represents more than 500,000 restaurant businesses, making it the world’s largest food service trade association. Over the last 28 years, the NRA and its largest corporate members have spent more than $78 million on campaign contributions, spending $12 million just in the 2016 election cycle. And they have a powerful and dangerous playbook: prevent minimum wage increases at any cost.

All three of the most recent minimum wage hike reversals received significant backing from the National Restaurant Association. In Michigan, dozens of legislators received campaign contributions from the National Restaurant Association during this past election cycle, including the House majority leader.

The Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association, the state-level partner of the NRA, openly bragged about the amount of control that this bought it over the state’s minimum wage fight, saying that it “worked tirelessly with the Michigan Legislature to prevent this onerous proposal from going to the ballot.”

Similarly, in Washington, D.C., the NRA contributed more than $236,000 in campaign funds to 13 of the city council’s 14 members. It helped fund an astroturf campaign designed to appear as if it was led by restaurant workers, which flooded public hearings with testimonies. In Maine, the Maine Restaurant Association vehemently lobbied the state legislature until the tipped minimum wage increase was overturned.

In most of its campaigns, the National Restaurant Association claims that minimum wage increases will hurt businesses and eliminate tips that workers depend on. Even a cursory review of the research shows that neither claim is true. The growth of restaurants and restaurant employment is more robust in “equal treatment states,” where there is no tipped minimum wage, compared with states that use the federal minimum tipped wage of $2.13 per hour. And tipped workers in those states see 17 percent higher earnings on average, including tips.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, one in six restaurant workers, or 16.7 percent, live below the official poverty line — fully 10 percentage points higher than workers outside the restaurant industry. Abolishing the tipped minimum wage is particularly beneficial to women and people of color, both of whom receive significantly less in tips than their white, male counterparts.

Raising the minimum wage is among the most popular polices out there, across party lines. In fact, a study released earlier this week finds that in literally every single state in the U.S., the minimum wage is lower than residents want it to be. That’s why when minimum wage increases are on the ballot, they pass. So the National Restaurant Association is doing everything it can to keep voters from having a say, with dangerous consequences for low-wage workers — and for democracy writ large.

The undisputed good news is that Americans chipped away at the old guard last night. After two years of constant stress about losing our health care, massive tax handouts to the wealthy, and open animosity towards anyone perceived as different, we finally gained some ground.

To celebrate, we’re taking a break from our usual doom and gloom and rounding up the results that we were excited to wake up to this morning.

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We finally have some good news about health care.

Congressional Democrats are in a better position to defend the Affordable Care Act, and are likely to work on stabilizing the ACA and addressing high drug prices in the new congress.

On a state level, voters were clearly motivated by concerns about health care. They also approved Medicaid expansion in three states: Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah. This extends Medicaid coverage to 340,000 low-income people.

The victories for Medicaid don’t stop there. In Maine, where the governor and voters have been engaged in a protracted battle over Medicaid expansion, Governor-elect Janet Mills says she’ll implement Medicaid expansion “immediately” upon taking office. Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Laura Kelly in Kansas could also drive expansion in their states, where leadership has historically resisted it. Sadly, all isn’t rosy: Montana voters rejected a ballot measure that would have extended Medicaid funding via a tobacco tax, ending coverage for nearly 100,000 residents.

A number of pro-choice candidates performed well last night. But two states, West Virginia and Alabama, amended their constitutions to specifically rule out the right to abortion. It’s a symbolic amendment for as long as Roe v. Wade stands, but the new balance on the Supreme Court could place it in jeopardy.

Florida is giving the vote to 1.4 million residents.

Florida’s Amendment 4 restored voting rights to people with felony records. Until last night, it had been one of only three states (now two) that denied people convicted of felonies the right to vote after they served their sentences. That disenfranchised more than 9 percent of the state’s population overall, and 21 percent of African Americans.

It’s difficult to estimate how big of an impact this could have moving forward, but it’s certainly possible that this influx of new voters will sway future elections. And, most importantly, it will allow more than a million people to vote on the policies that affect their lives.

One other bright spot last night was in Colorado: The state passed an amendment barring the use of slavery as punishment for a crime. Other ballot measures were, to put it nicely, kind of a bummer. Six states passed a version of Marsy’s law, which establishes a victims’ bill of rights that has the potential to violate the rights of people accused of crimes and makes it harder for people who are incarcerated to access parole boards and early release. In addition, North Dakota and Ohio both rejected measures that would lessen sentences for drug crimes.

Conservative states are raising their minimum wage.

Voters in Missouri and Arkansas approved increases in the minimum wage, which will together provide a raise to nearly 1 million workers. Missouri’s ballot initiative, which won with more than 62 percent of the vote, will hike its wage to $12 per hour by 2023. Arkansas’, approved by nearly 70 percent of voters, will increase the minimum wage to $11 per hour by 2021. Missouri’s initiative also reverses a minimum wage decrease that the state legislature imposed on St. Louis, which had raised its own minimum wage to $10 in 2017.

This continues a trend of minimum wage action on the state and local level. Though the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not been increased since 2007, four states approved wage hikes in 2014, and four more did the same in 2016, while cities including Baltimore, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. have increased their own minimums.

Still, 21 states adhere to the federal minimum wage, the purchasing power of which peaked in the 1960s. We would certainly like to see more movement here, since wages have been stagnant across the country for the last several decades – particularly for low-income workers and black and Hispanic families.

Massachusetts will uphold rights for transgender Americans.

In 2016, Massachusetts passed a bill to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in public places, but the law’s opponents managed to get it placed on the ballot this year. Voters upheld the law, which provides protections that don’t exist on a national level, by nearly 70 percent. In most states, it is still legal to discriminate against someone in housing, business, employment, and public accommodations because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Because we’re celebrating, we’ll gloss over how irritated the entire TalkPoverty staff is that it’s possible to put these rights on the ballot. Instead, we’ll look at this as a blow to the specious arguments that opponents to trans rights have been making against trans Americans.

San Francisco is taxing corporations to help people experiencing homelessness.

It was generally a bad night for tax policy on the state and local level, due to several states, including North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, approving anti-tax ballot measures, and the defeat of an effort to raise corporate taxes and implement a progressive income tax in Colorado in order to spend more money on public schools.

However, San Francisco approved an increase in its corporate tax — which will be levied on about 300 of its biggest businesses — in order to raise money to combat the city’s homelessness epidemic. At least 50 percent of the funding will be dedicated to direct housing in a city where some 7,500 people are experiencing homelessness.

The successful campaign in San Francisco was mirrored in two other Bay Area cities and counters a similar effort in Seattle, where the city council passed and then repealed a “head tax” due to opposition from Amazon and other big corporations.

I’ve worked in the service industry for 18 years, which means I’ve been a server in a restaurant for more of my life than I haven’t. There was the sports bar in Florida where we had to wear Catholic school girl uniforms, the barbecue joint in South Carolina next to the arena, the tiny Irish pub in South Charlotte, and the tiny English pub in South London. There was the café in pre-gentrified Brooklyn where the chef made the fluffiest scrambled eggs I’ve ever had, and the Mediterranean place in Helena, Montana with the teal ceiling and bright red chairs.

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Clashing color scheme aside, that Mediterranean restaurant is one of the only places I’ve been able to feel at home. The other servers had worked there for years, and we actually made enough money to live on. I shared an apartment with my sister that overlooked Mount Helena, and we had enough left over after we paid our bills that I could make roast beef at Christmas and throw my sister a surprise party to make up for her third-grade birthday party when no one came.

Montana is one of the eight states that does not have a subminimum wage for tipped positions. In North Carolina, I only made $2.13 an hour, but in Montana I made the state’s minimum: $8.30 an hour, and tips were a bonus. For the first time in my life, I could save money. I could get a drink with friends after a good week, and still be confident I’d be able to pay my rent after a bad one.

I never even meant to live there. I went out to visit my sister after a car accident left me depressed, rattled, and unsure about my direction in life. I stayed because it gave me time to heal.  By the time I left, nine months later, I was a first-time thousandaire. I had enough money in the bank to start over again in Philly, where I was back in restaurants that paid a subminimum wage. After a year of making $2.83 an hour, I drained my savings and had to sell my bed frame, bike, air conditioner, and beloved textbooks to pay my bills while I moved to D.C.

Now that I’m here, D.C. residents actually have a choice to get rid of the tipped minimum wage.  The debate has been one-sided: Besides the signs, restaurants have pushed their workers to vote against Initiative 77, or to keep their opinions to themselves if they’re voting for it. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is filled with residents asking if anyone knows what tipped workers actually want, with most of us staying uncomfortably silent.

The truth is, I would not have been able to support myself as a waitress in North Carolina, Florida, or Pennsylvania had it not been for my family’s help. That support is a luxury. Most tipped workers are well into adulthood, past the age that they can expect family to support them. The other servers I know work second and third jobs just to buy the basics, and almost half of us still need to rely on government assistance. Even though federal law says that restaurants have to make up the difference if a worker doesn’t earn the state-wide minimum wage in tips, that math never worked for me. Employee wages are perpetually pilfered by restaurants that feel their base wages, low as they are, are somehow enough.

One well-known restaurateur I worked for, who owns one of the most prominent restaurants in D.C., has a habit of arriving at his boutique restaurants in a chauffeured car, occupying several tables, ordering more than $800 of food and wine, and then leaving without tipping his server. His reason for not tipping was that he paid our wages, which added up to about $8.50 after the three hours of service he demanded. To him, that was enough. For me, it never was.

That restaurant owner thrived by underpaying us. He would still be successful if he paid us a fair wage. And the data shows that’s true across the industry.

Initiative 77 could help us. I’ve seen it first-hand. So, me? I’m voting yes.

The trouble is, there isn’t much actual information beyond the signage—and the information being shared isn’t backed by research.

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D.C.’s overall minimum wage is $12.50 per hour, and will increase to $15 by 2020. By law, employers have to ensure that tipped workers make that amount as well—by combining the base wage of $3.33 with their tips—and if workers’ wages are too low, employers are required to supplement them. In practice, employers often fail to do this. Research by the Economic Policy Institute found that recent Department of Labor investigations of close to 9,000 restaurants resulted in workers receiving nearly $5.5 million in back pay because of tipped wage violations.

Low wages have left many tipped workers struggling to make ends meet. Roughly 1 in 4 D.C. bartenders, servers, manicurists and pedicurists, and shampooers made $11.71 per hour or less in 2017*—well below a living wage in the district. D.C.’s tipped workers are also nearly twice as likely to live in poverty compared to the city’s overall workforce.

The concerns with the tipped wage go beyond just money—the power dynamics of the tipping system allow discrimination and inequality to flourish. One study showed that black servers receive tips that average 15 percent to 25 percent less than white servers, and in D.C., tipped female workers are twice as likely as tipped male workers to live in poverty. It also paves the way for sexual harassment: 1 in 7 sexual harassment charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are in the accommodation and food service industry.

In contrast, research shows that the eight states without a tipped minimum wage have higher average earnings and lower poverty rates among tipped workers, without hurting their employment rates. Specifically, in equal treatment states, tipped workers’ median earnings are 14 percent higher and the growth of restaurants and restaurant employment is more robust compared with states that use the federal minimum tipped wage of $2.13 per hour. Research also suggests that abolishing the tipped minimum wage may be particularly advantageous for women, as the average wage gap for women tipped workers in equal treatment states is one-third smaller than the wage gap for women tipped workers in states that maintain the federal tipped minimum wage.

While the evidence is clear on the positive impacts for D.C.’s lower-wage tipped workers, the District’s high-end restaurant and bar scene, with its higher-paid workforce, has been the center of attention during much of the debate, with figures ranging from Mayor Muriel Bowser to Chef José Andrés voicing concerns that the unified minimum wage will lead to higher prices and lower pay.

It’s tough to envision that high-end establishments’ well-off clientele, wine-and-dine lobbyists, and company-credit-card-wielding business travelers will suddenly become highly price-sensitive if the cost of a meal rises slightly. And any increase would likely be relatively small: Labor costs only account for an average of 30 percent of restaurant operating costs, and businesses absorb higher minimum wages through reductions in costly turnover and increases in productivity. It’s also unlikely diners would compensate for higher prices by offering a smaller gratuity: data on tipping show that tipping behavior in equal treatment states is virtually indistinguishable from tipping behavior in states that have different minimum wages for tipped workers.

What’s more, this focus on D.C.’s high-end establishments misses the bigger picture. Not only is the district home to many restaurant workers who struggle to make ends meet—even after tips—but one-fifth of D.C.’s tipped workers aren’t in the restaurant industry at all. Many valets and manicurists, for example, don’t earn 20 percent on top of an expensive meal, but the Department of Labor allows their employers to pay them D.C.’s $3.33 per hour base wage as long as they “customarily and regularly” receive $30 or more per month in tips.

Initiative 77—which 70 percent of voters support—would reduce poverty and increase economic security among tipped workers in the district, as well as better protect them against discrimination, wage theft, and sexual harassment. The effects would be particularly powerful for women and people of color. Chipping in a little more for craft cocktails and small plates at happy hour seems like a small price to pay.

* Note: At the time these data were collected, the minimum wage in Washington, D.C. was $11.50 per hour.

That’s what’s behind the MLK50 Justice Through Journalism project, a year-long reporting project on economic justice in Memphis, which takes a hard look at the institutions that are keeping so many of the city’s residents in poverty.

I spoke with the project’s founder, editor, and publisher, Wendi Thomas.

Rebecca Vallas: Just to kick things off, tell me a little bit about the project and the story behind its founding.

Wendi Thomas: I guess its initial origins were out of a writing project I was doing at The Commercial Appeal when I was a Metro columnist there. I was covering the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, and I was thinking even then what we would do to mark the 50th anniversary. And so I’ve been ruminating on this for about ten years—what would it look like to honor the dreamer in Memphis? If you know anything about King’s legacy you know that that means you better reckon with jobs and wages, because that’s why King was in Memphis. It was for underpaid public employees who wanted higher wages and the right to a union. So many of those issues are so relevant still today that my team has had no shortage of stories to write and things to cover.

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RV: Why commemorate Dr. King’s legacy and the anniversary of his passing through journalism? And what does journalism have to do with justice?

WT: I think King spoke truth to power. A lot of the things he said were controversial, some of the parts we don’t remember: his opposition to the Vietnam war, his critique of capitalism … and I think good journalism also speaks truth to power, at least the kind of journalism that I’m interested in doing. And while there’s a notion that journalism is completely impartial and doesn’t take sides, I think there are some things we can take sides on. I think we can take sides and say that all children should have an education, right? That shouldn’t be a controversial political position.

Similarly, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that all workers should make enough to live on. If you work full time you should make enough to make your ends meet. To the extent that we can help eliminate the systems and structures that keep that from happening, that keep poor people poor, then there is a role for justice in journalism.

RV: Did you launch the project as its own separate entity because you didn’t feel that these stories were being told adequately in mainstream media?

WT: After I left the daily paper here in Memphis I did a fellowship at Harvard at the Nieman Foundation. That’s where I incubated this project and figured out exactly how it’s going to work. And I don’t think that you would find this kind of journalism in most mainstream news publications, because it is very critical of the status quo. Advertisers and readers aren’t used to having their perspectives and practices challenged. That’s all new for them. And I don’t think traditional mainstream news outlets would want to rile up their advertisers like that—they’re trying to keep them happy, which unfortunately has the side effect of reinforcing the status quo, which is to keep poor people poor.

RV: As part of this project, your team conducted a living wage survey of Memphis employers. What did you find in that survey?

WT: Yeah, so we took a look at the 25 largest area employers who collectively represent about 160,000 employees. And what we found was that most companies don’t want to say how much they pay their workers. So I talked to an economist about that—what can you conclude if a company doesn’t want to tell you how much they pay their workers, whether they pay a living wage? And the answer is they’re hiding something. If companies have good news to report, they’re glad to share that.

We were actually surprised to find that the City of Memphis government, Shelby County government, and Shelby County schools all do pay their workers fairly well. I mean we’re not talking $20 an hour—but we’re talking 85 percent more than $15 an hour. And the Shelby County schools have recently made a commitment to pay its workers $15 an hour, so that’s a good thing. But when you get into other employers, say private employers like FedEx, which is headquartered here and employs 30,000 people—FedEx doesn’t want to say. They answered some of our questions, but when pressed for more information about benefits and whether they use temp workers or outsource work, they sent us a statement about how much money they give to charity events. And charity isn’t justice.

RV: A lot of the stories in this project are focused on Memphis in particular, and they really put a face on the fight for a living wage. I’d love if you would tell some of the stories that your reporters have been telling through this project.

WT: Let’s see, gosh, where would I start? We’ve written a series of stories about companies that pay their workers enough to live on—unfortunately it’s not a long list of companies and they tend to be really small, maybe nonprofits or family-owned businesses—to show that it is possible, you can have these discussions within your organization. We ran a story about a woman who works at a company that she started making $15 an hour, and now she’s able to afford a home. And so these wages aren’t just so you can get your hair done or your nails done, it’s so you can have some kind of stability for you and for your family. So those stories are always fun to tell.

We did a story about hotel housekeepers, and what it’s like to work as one where you’re having to do more work with less. One of the hotel housekeepers told us that she has to bring her own cleaning supplies because they don’t supply her with those.

We even have some stories on the site in the last couple of days about how this anniversary commemoration is really not for the people who live right around the Civil Rights Museum. So if you just walk a block over from the museum, Lorraine Motel where King was killed, you walk just a block over and it’s just abject poverty, and people who feel like this commemoration is not for them. The signature event tonight is going to be $100-a-plate gala. You’d have to work 14 hours if you make minimum wage to afford a ticket. And so there’s this tension between honoring this man who came here about labor and then also respecting the labor that’s still here today.

RV: How do you think that Dr. King would want us to be commemorating his legacy and the anniversary of his passing 50 years later?

WT: Yeah, I don’t think he would give two whits about, what would be the nice way of saying it. I don’t think he would care about these galas and these celebrations and these big shindigs with lots of people pontificating. I would like to think he’d be out here in the streets with the protestors and the activists. We have about 8 protesters that were outside the jail yesterday that got arrested, dragged on the street by police, cuffed in plastic zip ties. I like to think he would be with them today were he alive. I think he would be disappointed to know that Memphis is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the nation and 52 percent of the black children here live below the poverty line. But that’s what we’ve got. And the question we need to answer is the question posed by King’s last book, which is, where do we go from here?

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on April 5. It was edited for length and clarity.

The order, titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” carries little weight by itself. It directs a broad range of federal agencies to review programs serving low-income people and make recommendations on how they can make the programs harder to access, all under the guise of “welfare reform.”

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The order’s main purpose appears to be smearing popular programs in an effort to make them easier to slash—in part by redefining “welfare” to encompass nearly every program that helps families get by. To that end, the order reads as follows:

The terms “welfare” and “public assistance” include any program that provides means-tested assistance, or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households, or families that have low incomes (i.e., those making less than twice the Federal poverty level), the unemployed, or those out of the labor force.

Redefining everything from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) to Medicaid to Unemployment Insurance to child care assistance as “welfare” has long been part of conservatives’ playbook, as my colleague Shawn Fremstad has pointed out. The term has a deeply racially charged history in the United States, evoking decades of racial stereotypes about poverty and the people who experience it. By using dog-whistle terms like welfare, Trump is erecting a smokescreen in the shape of President Reagan’s myth of the “welfare queen”—so we don’t notice that he’s coming after the entire working and middle class.

The fact is, we don’t have welfare in America anymore. What’s left of America’s tattered safety net is meager at best, and—contrary to the claim in Trump’s executive order that it leads to “government dependence”—it’s light-years away from enough to live on.

Take the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP provides an average of just $1.40 per person per meal. Most families run out of SNAP by the third week of the month because it’s so far from enough to feed a family on.

Then there’s housing assistance, which reaches just 1 in 5 eligible low-income families. Those left without help can spend up to 80 percent of their income on rent and utilities each month, while they remain on decades-long waitlists for assistance.

And then there’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 when Congress famously “[ended] welfare as we know it.” Fewer than 1 in 4 poor families with kids get help from TANF today—down from 80 percent in 1996. In fact, in several states, kids are more likely to be placed in foster care than receive help from TANF.

Families who do receive TANF are lucky if the benefits even bring them halfway to the austere federal poverty line. For example, a Tennessee family of 3 can only receive a maximum of $185 per month, or a little over $6 a day.

Yet TANF is the program Trump is holding up as a model—hailing 1996 “welfare reform” as a wild success—despite the fact that TANF has proven an abject failure both in terms of protecting struggling families from hardship and in helping them get ahead.

In particular, this executive order directs agencies to ramp up so-called “work requirements”—harsh time limits on assistance for certain unemployed and underemployed workers—which were at the heart of the law that created TANF. But decades of research since TANF was enacted show that work requirements do not help anyone work.

Make no mistake: Pushing for “work requirements” is at the core of the conservative strategy to reinforce myths about poverty in America. That “the poor” are some stagnant group of people who “just don’t want to work.” That anyone who wants a well-paying job can snap her fingers to make one appear. And that having a job is all it takes to not be poor.

But in reality, millions of Americans are working two, even three jobs to make ends meet and provide for their families. Half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have even $400 in the bank. And nearly all of us—70 percent—will turn to some form of means-tested assistance, like Medicaid or SNAP, at some point in our lives.

Trump claims his executive order is intended to eliminate “poverty traps.” But if he knew anything about poverty—aside from what he’s learned on Fox News—he’d know the real poverty trap is the minimum wage, which has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour for nearly a decade. That’s well below the poverty line for a family of two—and not nearly enough to live on. There isn’t a single state in the country in which a minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at market rate. Many low-wage workers are forced to turn to programs like Medicaid and SNAP to make ends meet, because wages aren’t enough.

If Trump were really trying to promote “self-sufficiency”—a concept he clearly doesn’t think applies to the millionaires and billionaires to whom he just gave massive tax cuts—he’d be all over raising the minimum wage. In fact, raising the minimum wage just to $12 would save $53 billion in SNAP alone over a decade, as more low-wage workers would suddenly earn enough to feed their families without nutrition assistance.

Yet there’s no mention of the minimum wage anywhere in Trump’s order to “promote opportunity and economic mobility.”

Which brings us back to the real purpose of this executive order: divide and conquer.

Trump and his colleagues in Congress learned the hard way last year how popular Medicaid is when they tried to cut it as part of their quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not just Medicaid that Americans don’t want to see cut. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to SNAP, housing assistance, Social Security disability benefits, home heating assistance, and a whole slew of programs that help families get by—particularly if these cuts are to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. What’s more, as polling by the Center for American Progress shows, Americans are less likely to vote for a candidate who backs cuts.

By contrast, vast majorities of Americans across party lines want to see their policymakers raise the minimum wage; ensure affordable, high-quality child care; and even enact a job guarantee to ensure everyone who is able and wants to work can find a job with decent wages. These sentiments extend far beyond the Democratic base to include majorities of Independents, Republicans, and even Trump’s own voters.

That’s why rebranding these programs as welfare is so important to Trump’s agenda. Rather than heed the wishes of the American people, Trump’s plan is—yet again—to tap into racial animus and ugly myths about aid programs in order to pit struggling workers against one other. That way, he can hide his continued betrayal of the “forgotten men and women” for whom he famously pledged to fight.

They delivered their petitions. The city council put their living-wage initiative on the November ballot. When they convened a public hearing, a hundred hotel workers came to watch. Twenty-two registered to testify. They took time off, found babysitters, and wrote their testimonies.

Then, at the last minute, the hearing was canceled.

Brito was angry. She believed city officials had been pressured by the Procaccianti Group, a hotel management and construction company that donates heavily to Rhode Island political campaigns. “The Procacciantis,” she said, made her clean 18 rooms daily, made her work till the day she gave birth. Then “the hotel told me they couldn’t guarantee me a job. I was fired for speaking out. I know it.” She shakes her head, disgusted. “I used to be afraid, but I’ve lost my fear. What else can they do to me?”

“I have the power, the will, and the strength to fight and take a stand,” she says. “I have a right to create a union in my workplace and fight to correct grievances. It’s very important to be united at work, to be able to confront the injustices we face.”

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It seemed for a while that the workers were winning, that the $15 wage would become law in Providence. Then state legislators introduced a pre-emption bill, banning local governments from enacting a wage higher than the Rhode Island minimum, which was only $8 an hour. Brito was outraged. “I have to borrow money from my brothers and cousins just to pay off my bills,” she said.

The Rhode Island legislature was majority Democratic, but hotel and restaurant owners lobbied hard. They paid $100,000 to lobbyists to push the bill. “House leadership is moving to jail us in poverty,” said Brito. Brito and Ferraris announced a life-or-death fight for Rhode Island’s working families. Seventy-three percent of jobs in the state paid too little to live on. The state’s workforce—Dominican, Guatemalan, South American, Haitian, and Cape Verdean immigrants—lived in poverty, says Maldonado, unable to feed their children decently. So Brito and Ferraris, hotel chef Mirjaam Parada, and Maldonado decided to stage a huelga de hambre—a hunger strike. Setting up camp on the steps of the state capitol, the women told reporters they were giving up food so that the state’s children might have enough to eat.

Photographs of the four women, and of Brito’s young son, circulated widely. It wasn’t enough. A majority voted for preemption.

By 2017, with Rhode Island’s minimum still only $9.60 an hour, service workers seeking raises began reaching out to sympathetic business owners. Jeremiah Tolbert, owner of Jerry’s Beauty Salon in Providence, became a spokesperson. He upped his workers’ wages to $15, then invited the press to explain why. When small businesses pay more, local workers have money in their pockets to spend. For Tolbert, raising wages has been “a win-win.” He has urged other local businesses to follow suit.

Nine months later and 3,000 miles away, another group of hunger strikers from Walmart battled for a living wage. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti had long insisted that he would only support raising the city wage to $13.25, says Denise Barlage. In April 2015, she and seven other women workers sat down outside LA City Hall. They sat there for two weeks, consuming only tea and water. Though temperatures hovered in the 60s, Barlage felt cold by the sixth day without food. Her blood pressure was low. She donned a hat and gloves to keep it from falling further.

“We were ready to be arrested,” she recalls. “We were going to handcuff ourselves to the building.” Then they saw the mayor walking toward them. They held up their sign: “Women Fast for $15.” The mayor stopped. He looked at them, leaned down. “Then he told us he was on board with 15,” Barlage remembers. Weak from days of fasting, some of the women began to cry.

Before breaking their fast, the hunger strikers testified before the city council at a minimum wage hearing. The strikers were mothers and grandmothers who worked two or three jobs to survive, Barlage says, but still had to choose “whether to feed their children or themselves. That’s just wrong.” The women spoke of their fears of eviction and homelessness. They told of kids who didn’t have decent clothes for school or bus fare to get there.

“I am Mary Carmen Farfan, mother of four. I work at Burger King,” one woman began. “I decided to make a fast for my kids, for my family, for my coworkers. These are single mothers. We have struggled to pay rent, to feed our kids … I can’t … because I have only $9 for a minimum wage.” No one can afford to live in LA on less than $15 an hour, Mary said. She also told city officials how she shared a home with nineteen people from three families who earned between $9 and $13 an hour. By hearing’s end, LA’s City Council had voted for the $15 wage, says Barlage. “What that felt like, I can’t describe.”

Barlage is one among many living-wage activists for whom hunger strikes have become a way of life, a potent weapon because it crystallizes the moral bottom line of this struggle. “So many workers today are used to being hungry,” Barlage says. “Hunger doesn’t scare us. It only scares people who aren’t used to it.”

Seven months after their successful fast in LA, Walmart workers fasted for ten days on Manhattan’s most famously wealthy boulevard, Park Avenue. They chose the Thanksgiving holiday—a ritualized celebration of American overindulgence—to highlight hunger among Walmart workers. Barlage came. So did workers from Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, and Maryland, their neon-green OUR Walmart shirts glowing in the gray November chill as they sat outside Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s penthouse. Walton sits on a personal fortune north of $33 billion, and her apartment was rumored to have cost $25 million.

Sacramento activist Tyfani Faulkner says she came because “people don’t realize that many Walmart workers are starving.” She says it galls her that her colleagues are hungry. “You’re working at this huge grocery store and workers are living off ramen noodles and chips because they can’t afford to eat better. I thought fasting was a great way to show that and to be in solidarity with those who aren’t eating, not because they don’t want to but because they don’t earn enough to eat well.”

“We didn’t see Alice Walton the whole week,” she says. The doorman told Barlage that Walton had groceries delivered rather than walk past the hunger strikers. “He told us she was up there drinking Scotch and smoking cigarettes, rather than talk to us.” Meanwhile, the protesters lived on donated broth and tea. “I stayed and fasted for ten days,” Barlage says, “because I didn’t have a job to go back to. Walmart had closed our store. They said it was plumbing problems but it was because we were too loud and strong.”

The Park Avenue hunger strike was part of a nationwide “Fast for $15.” A thousand people across the United States forswore food for two weeks leading up to the shopping frenzy that is Black Friday. Some fasted in front of the Carmel, California, mansion of Walmart chairman Greg Penner. Bleu Rainer fasted in front of a Tampa Walmart. Fasting workers could be seen outside many Walmart stores. Finding a thousand people to fast might have been hard except that hunger is a condition that low-wage workers know too well. “I have had to rely on food stamps to get a good meal,” Rainer says. “And when those food stamps run out, it’s back to square one, which is nothing at all.”

Hunger is widespread in the United States. In 2016, more than 60 million Americans qualified for food aid. That’s nearly 20 percent of citizens in the richest country in the history of the world. Forty-five million Americans that year received assistance through SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), the federal program that used to be called food stamps. (Most people who receive it still do call it that.)

But in some U.S. counties, as many as two-thirds of hungry citizens do not receive aid. Toward the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and at the beginning of Barack Obama’s, expansions in federal food aid cut the numbers of hungry Americans significantly. But then, Congress and state legislatures slashed budgets and tightened eligibility. And the number of hungry Americans rose again. Many of the hungriest are children.

Hunger is endemic in places you’d least expect, in affluent states like New York and California, and even more so in the nation’s most expensive cities and suburbs. Forty-two percent of students in the University of California system did not have enough to eat in 2016. Forty-five percent of UC employees said they were frequently hungry. Twenty-five percent ate substandard food because they could not afford better. Seventy percent skipped meals to save money.

And these are the winners: students and employees at one of the world’s great university systems. Fifty-eight percent of surveyed employees held bachelor’s degrees or higher. Ninety-six percent worked full-time and were the primary earners for their families. Clearly, they represent just the tip of the iceberg of hunger in America.

“The thing that so many Americans just don’t seem to get,” says Barlage, “is that Walmart workers and McDonald’s workers and so many other working people in this country are really, actually hungry all the time.” OUR Walmart activists ask workers who bring lunch to “pool what we have so everyone can get a little—chips, some sandwich. Otherwise a lot of people won’t have anything to eat. We take Walmart’s line about how we’re all family seriously—even if they don’t.” Pooling food has become part of what the movement does. “That’s why we do hunger strikes. Two weeks without food. I might feel a little cold. My blood pressure might drop a little. But I can do it. Hunger doesn’t scare me.”

Excerpted from “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck (Beacon Press, 2018). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

Photography by Liz Cooke.

Inmates are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that workers are paid at least the federal minimum wage. That makes it completely legal for states to exploit inmates for free or cheap labor. More than half of the 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons work while incarcerated, and the vast majority only make a few cents per hour.

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Most inmates work in their own prison facilities, in jobs such as maintenance or food service. These jobs pay an average of just 86 cents an hour, and are primarily designed to keep the prison running at a low cost. Others may be employed in so-called “correctional industries,” where inmates work for the Department of Corrections to produce goods that are sold to government entities and nonprofit organizations. The highest median wages for these jobs top out at less than $2 an hour, and they’ve dropped over time—an incarcerated worker is paid less today than they were in 2001. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, most inmates working in prison facilities aren’t paid at all.

It is impossible to discuss prison labor without acknowledging the deep ties the criminal justice system has to the legacy of slavery in the United States. Targeted mass incarceration policies, racial bias, and other structural disadvantages have led to an overrepresentation of people of color—particularly African Americans—in prisons and jails. As activist and author Shaka Senghor notes in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th, “The 13^th amendment says, ‘no involuntary servitude except for those who have been duly convicted of a crime.’ So once you’ve been convicted of a crime, you are in essence a slave of the state.”

Though we run the risk of stating the obvious, there is a clear solution available: treating prisoners like people rather than chattel. That means paying prisoners a minimum wage for their work, and making sure the employment options in prison are designed to help people transition into their communities once they are released.

Apprenticeship programs, which provide paid training that combines on-the-job learning with classroom instruction, may be the perfect solution. These programs can equip inmates with a marketable skill, a wage, and a credential that holds value in the labor market and can help them get a job upon release. A recent Center for American Progress report suggests using paid apprenticeships during incarceration to help inmates and their families support themselves after incarceration and reduce recidivism.

However, these programs frequently suffer the same pitfall as other prison work programs—they pay breathtakingly low wages. Since 2008, the median starting wage has been 7 cents an hour and the median exit wage 35 cents an hour—hardly enough to put inmates on the road to financial stability.

If these programs paid decent wages, they could increase economic stability of inmates, effectively easing the path to re-entry. They would allow inmates to pay off debts from their interactions with the justice system and reduce recidivism. They’re not a panacea, but well-paid apprenticeships can help put returning citizens on the road toward a good job and a secure future.

The criminal justice system has historically relied on a system of punishment and exploitation instead of rehabilitation, but we can change this going forward. Treating incarcerated people like human beings by paying them for their work is a good place to start.

Five years ago, when fast-food workers formed the Fight for $15 movement, it seemed like a pipe dream. Sanders’s 2015 bill advocating for a $15 federal minimum wage received just five co-sponsors, and throughout the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton supported a more modest $12 per hour wage. But last week’s bill already has support of nearly half the Democrats in the Senate, and has champions lined up in the House.

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With Republicans in control of both Congress and the White House, the bill stands little chance of passing. But raising the minimum wage is one of the best tools we have to fight poverty, so it’s worth understanding the details of the legislation that Congressional Democrats have united behind.

Here’s How the Bill Works

If enacted, the Raise the Wage Act of 2017 would raise the federal minimum wage by $2 this year, to $9.25. That would immediately raise wages in 37 states. Thereafter, the wage would increase by about a dollar per year until it reaches $15 in 2024. Ultimately, that will raise wages in 48 states (New York, California, and the District of Columbia, which make up nearly one-fifth of the national workforce, have already enacted their own $15 minimum wage legislation).

After 2024, increases would be linked to growth in the median wage. That’s actually a big deal. In the past, the minimum wage has only increased when new legislation specifically raised it. That’s a slow process, and Congress typically doesn’t bother to do it until inflation has caused the minimum wage to lose a lot of value.  There have been several proposals to link the federal minimum wage to inflation, so that it would increase automatically each year, but none of them have ever become law. This bill skips right over inflation and links to the median wage, which tends to grow faster than inflation does. That would ensure that wage growth for low-wage workers would keep pace with the rest of the workforce, which would curb inequality and make a meaningful statement about the value of their work.

The bill would also gradually phase out subminimum wages for tipped workers, young people, and people with disabilities. Their minimum wages—currently set at $2.13 per hour for tipped workers, $4.25 per hour for young people, and as low as pennies per hour for disabled people—would be raised gradually until they are even with the federal minimum wage.

By the time the minimum wage hits $15 in 2024, it will likely have the same purchasing power as about $12.50 to $13.50 does today (depending on inflation). That’s about 70 percent to 85 percent greater than the current federal minimum wage, and about 30 percent more than the minimum wage’s peak value in 1968. It would be just enough to keep a family of four out of poverty—unlike the current minimum wage, which leaves a family of four well below the federal poverty line.

Here’s Who It Would Help

According to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 3 in 10 American workers—more than 41 million people—would see higher wages under the Raise the Wage Act of 2017. Two-thirds of affected people work full time, and well over half are women. And, although white workers would be the largest group to benefit in terms of population size, the bill would disproportionately help workers of color. More than 4 in 10 African American workers—and one-third of Latino workers—would get a raise. Children also stand to gain a lot, since nearly 1 in 4 have a parent who would be affected.

The average affected worker is 36 years old, and is a primary breadwinner who uses their earnings to support their family. These low-wage workers are not only older, but also more productive and better educated than their counterparts in prior generations. Nearly half (46.5 percent) have at least some college experience.

Here’s What It Would Do for the Economy

The average directly affected full-time, year-round worker would see his annual earnings rise by more than $5,000 by 2024—an increase of nearly one-third. The bill would increase consumer spending and reduce taxpayer spending on public-assistance programs such as nutrition assistance since workers would be able to make ends meet on their own.

To be sure, economists can’t predict the full effects of a $15 minimum wage, even if it is phased in slowly. We can be confident that the increased consumer spending would give local economies a boost, but we can’t be positive that there would be no adverse effect on employment.

Even if employers responded to the wage hike by cutting workers’ hours, or if workers ended up spending a few extra days between jobs, the benefits would likely far outweigh the negatives. First of all, the wage hike is big enough that workers who experience a reduction in hours may still break even or come out ahead in terms of annual earnings. Second, there are other legislative options that could make sure disadvantaged workers do not feel negative effects. This includes, for example, expanding our Unemployment Insurance system to cover low-wage workers who spend a few extra days searching for their next job; extending short-time compensation and partial unemployment benefits for workers who experience reductions in hours; and creating subsidized employment, national service, paid training, and apprenticeship opportunities for folks who are unable to find work.

It’s also worth remembering that there are benefits beyond pure economic growth and workers’ pay. A $15 minimum wage would help increase family stability and close stubborn gender and racial wage gaps. Rigorous research also shows that higher minimum wages improve infant health, reduce crime, and decrease poverty.

It’s a Political Long Shot—but Not Introduced in Vain

Since Republicans have the majority in Congress, this bill can’t pass without their support. And, even though the bill is popular with the public and would help Trump keep his promise to give his supporters higher wages at virtually no cost to government, it’s unlikely that Congressional Republicans are going to reverse course and suddenly support minimum wage hikes.   

But even if Congress doesn’t pass this bill, it will likely encourage wage hikes on a local level. Sen. Sanders’ previous $15 proposal, inspired by the Fight for $15, preceded successful state and local bills such as those in California, New York, the District of Columbia, and Seattle. Similarly, Sen. Murray and Rep. Scott’s bill for $12 by 2020 provided the wage target for Arizona and Colorado’s laws. With a strong majority of voters across party lines supporting a higher minimum wage, more states and localities can be expected to take matters into their own hands by adapting federal legislation.

Correction: This article originally stated that the Raise the Wage Act of 2017 would immediately raise wages in 48 states. It will immediately raise wages in 37 states, and eventually raise wages in 48 states.

Arizona has traditionally been a conservative stronghold. It’s where Barry Goldwater launched his career; where, more than 60 years later, John McCain was officially censured for being too liberal. It’s the birthplace of one of the most anti-immigrant bills in the nation, and it’s home to a legislature that recently passed a law that would have allowed businesses to refuse service to gay people.

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But in November, amid Trump’s victory and a conservative sweep in Congress, Arizona boasted several progressive wins. It was one of four states to pass minimum wage legislation via ballot initiative: Prop 206, which gained 58% of the vote, will raise the state minimum wage to $12 by 2020 and give workers the right to paid sick time. Arizonans also elected several progressive Latino candidates, including Adrian Fontes, the new Maricopa County recorder, and Juan Mendez, an openly atheist state senator. And of course, Maricopa voters ousted Arpaio—ending his 24-year authoritarian reign.

These wins were not isolated events. They were part of a larger progressive movement in Arizona—one that’s been building for several years.

***

For many Arizonans, Arpaio is the embodiment of anti-immigrant hate. While in office, he persecuted immigrants—and the entire Latino community—with a singular focus. When the U.S. Department of Justice sued him in 2012 for racial profiling, the formal legal complaint was full of frightening anecdotes of police misconduct: Latino drivers were “nearly nine times” more likely to be pulled over than non-Latino drivers; Latino people were regularly detained solely due to their race; and Latino detainees were often punished as a group.

Liedy Robledo, one of the lead organizers of the Bazta Arpaio campaign credited with Arapaio’s defeat in November, was raised by undocumented parents in Maricopa County under Sheriff Arpaio’s rule. Robledo says she didn’t realize how discriminatory Arpaio’s policing was until she moved to Colorado in 2008. She was a senior in high school at the time, and she remembers noticing that the police there wouldn’t pull people over just to check their immigration status. “When the sheriff would drive down the street, they had a purpose—they weren’t just patrolling.”

Robledo became involved with youth organizing in Denver as legislators in her home state were crafting S.B. 1070, Arizona’s extreme anti-immigrant bill. She recalls it as a defining moment in her political development. She began thinking less about Arpaio as an individual actor and more about “the entire culture he’s built.” After she graduated, Robledo returned to Maricopa County, determined to organize against hate and injustice.

S.B. 1070 was also a catalyst for Tomas Robles, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), the group that led the statewide campaign for Prop 206. “It called a lot of us into action,” he says.

But according to Robles, when S.B. 1070 passed in 2010, there was no organizing infrastructure yet for immigrant justice and economic justice in Arizona. They had to build it themselves. “We were the first group of leaders and organizers that came out of that 2010 struggle.”

In response to S.B. 1070, ten community organizations came together to form One Arizona, a coalition designed to combat against anti-immigrant legislation and get Latino voters to the polls. One of the founding groups, Puente, also partnered with LUCHA to create People United for Justice, which oversaw Bazta Arpaio and helped train leaders in both campaigns.

This emerging infrastructure created a new generation of organizers. “It’s kind of strange saying ‘generation’ when it’s only seven years,” Robles muses. But that’s exactly what it is—both Robles and Robledo began as volunteers, grew into leadership roles, then trained the next crop of leaders.

***

If there are parallels between Bazta Arpaio and LUCHA’s campaign for Prop 206, it’s likely because many of the organizers trained together and share a theory of change—one that focuses on training leaders from the most directly affected communities.

LUCHA had community members lead every aspect of the campaign, and most of its leaders were women of color. “Leadership development was ingrained in us from the very beginning,” Robles says. Bazta shared this same commitment: One of their organizers was a mother from the community who had never used a computer before. Robledo says she had to learn how to use a phone and a computer, but “by the end, she was cutting her own turf”—drafting lists and sending mass texts.

This leadership development pipeline allowed Bazta to leverage the strengths of different community members. “Our moms are really good at going into the churches and getting volunteers,” Robeldo said, while the younger organizers use their access to school to recruit student volunteers.

Robledo’s own experience as a community leader brought her back to the neighborhood where she grew up. When she was younger, her parents wouldn’t want her to walk down certain streets after school. But as an organizer with Bazta, those were the streets she had to walk, the doors she had to knock on. “It was really empowering, taking back Phoenix.”

***

Both Bazta Arpaio and the Prop 206 campaign relied heavily on door-to-door canvassing to gather votes, but not until after they’d built momentum in other ways. Bazta had a wide-ranging direct action and communications strategy that involved an enormous inflatable of Arpaio, a roving bus, murals, internet memes, and an online game. “By the time we knocked on doors,” says Robledo, “people already knew who we were.”

Similarly, LUCHA started creating momentum for the minimum wage fight in 2013. They staged actions with Fight for 15 and led community forums and workshops to get people fired up about economic justice. After two years of this, they funded a statewide poll and found that their work had paid off—most voters would support paid sick time and a higher minimum wage. Now they just had to get the votes.

Once it was time for both campaigns to knock on doors, they did so with extreme ardor, hitting thousands of doors per week for several months. “Tomas Robles and the Prop 206 campaign—they just outworked the opponents,” says Greg Stanton, Phoenix’s mayor. Stanton lauded Bazta’s volunteer canvassers for hitting “hundreds of doors per person per night”—especially since campaigns in Arizona take place during the hottest part of the year, when it often reaches 110 degrees or more. “They won this the right way,” he says.

The same tactics helped get Stanton elected in 2012. In West Phoenix, which had a large Latino population but low voter turnout, a group of young canvassers—some of whom Stanton says were the same people that worked on Bazta and Prop 206—knocked on 72,000 doors, increasing Latino voter turnout by more than 400% in one election cycle.

Bazta’s door-to-door canvassing was a winning combination of grim determination and clinical efficiency. Robledo says that before counting a vote in their favor, volunteers would have to walk people through every step of the ballot application process: “Fill it out. Sign it. Put it in the mail.” And if the canvassers found a good story at the door, they’d hand it over to the communications team, so the canvassers could “keep on hitting more doors.”

Perhaps the biggest obstacle the canvassers faced was a feeling of powerlessness among voters. Robles said that most people supported raising the minimum wage, but they’d say, “There’s no way that can happen here in Arizona.” And the Bazta canvassers heard hundreds of iterations of “my vote doesn’t count” or “he’s going to win again” or “he’s invincible.” They didn’t have to convince people there was a problem—they had to convince them that there was a solution, that they had the power to change the status quo.

On election day, Bazta’s young volunteers felt this power. They had been scrambling that week because of last-minute court decisions to revoke, and then reinstate, a ban on collecting ballots, which caused many voters to miss the deadline to mail their absentee ballots. Bazta went to two high schools to try to get 50 students from each school to spend their afternoon canvassing. But people were so energized that 100 students walked out of each school to volunteer—so many that the organizers ran out of doors to give to people.

***

Bazta’s victory in defeating an anti-immigrant authoritarian leader has obvious national parallels. As Progress Now’s executive director Josselyn Berry says, “In Arizona, we’ve seen Trumps before, and we’ve been able to defeat them.”

But the beauty of the Bazta Arpaio campaign—and LUCHA’s victorious Prop 206 campaign—is that they’ve created a movement that will outlast one election cycle. By rallying voters for their respective causes, these two campaigns helped the One Arizona coalition register 150,000 new Latino voters in Arizona—more than Trump’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan combined. And they raised a new generation of leaders in the Latino community, including hundreds of 17- and 18-year-old students who are now realizing their political power.

It’s tempting to think that the progressive uprising in Arizona is a direct result of S.B. 1070 and Arpaio’s culture of hate; that those oppressive conditions, via some social analog of Newton’s third law, triggered an opposite reaction. The pendulum of history swung to the right, and it was only a matter of time before it inevitably corrected itself.

But progressive change is not inevitable, nor is it easy. It takes strategic organizing and collective resilience. And sometimes, it takes a swarm of volunteers knocking on door after door after door beneath Arizona’s punishing midsummer sun.

And now he has nominated Andrew Puzder, the billionaire fast-food executive, to lead the Department of Labor.

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If Trump’s actual goal is to display utter contempt for American workers, then burger-czar Puzder is a pretty strong choice. He’s a key figure in an industry that’s notorious for labor abuses, including low wages and wage theft, and he has personally played a strong role in perpetuating those injustices. According to a recent Labor Department investigation, the majority of Puzder’s own restaurants—about 60%—were found to be in violation of labor laws.

And now Puzder will be tasked with enforcing the very laws he has repeatedly broken.

Puzder vocally opposes labor protections that are crucial for most Americans, including overtime pay, protections from workplace discrimination, and access to affordable health care. But his nomination deals a particularly violent blow to the nation’s most vulnerable and lowest-paid workers. Despite the fact that he makes more in a day than the typical fast-food worker earns in an entire year, Puzder believes that low-wage workers are paid too much. He has been an outspoken opponent of the minimum wage, which puts him at odds with more than 90% of Americans. And his claims that higher minimum wages lead employers to cut jobs runs counter to decades of rigorous research showing that moderate minimum wage increases boost family income without affecting employment.

Nowhere is Puzder’s nomination more devastating than in the 21 states where policymakers have refused to raise the minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25 per hour. The overwhelming majority of those states—19 out of 21—voted for Trump after he promised to be “a president who will protect them and fight for them.” They have been waiting more than seven years for a raise, and every year the purchasing power of their $7.25 shrinks—making it even more difficult to make ends meet. But with a Labor Secretary who thinks “some jobs don’t produce enough economic value” to justify a minimum-wage increase, a president who has declared that wages are “too high,” and a Republican Congress that has repeatedly rejected widely supported minimum-wage legislation, these workers will likely have to keep waiting.

If the federal minimum wage stays at its current level, by the end of Trump’s first term it will be worth 20% less than it was worth when Congress last increased it in 2009. That means a full-time minimum-wage worker would earn just $13,750 per year in today’s dollars—nearly 15% below the poverty line for a family of two.

Adding insult to injury, Puzder penned an op-ed last year that lambasted Americans who must turn to public assistance to make ends meet. But there’s a simple reason that low-wage workers are eligible for public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid: It’s because employers like Puzder pay their employees too little to survive.

It’s the height of hypocrisy that Trump—who sold himself as a champion for American workers—has crowned an anti-labor billionaire to be the nation’s chief advocate for working people. To preserve and protect American workers’ rights, security, and dignity—and to prevent the most vulnerable, lowest-paid workers from sinking further into poverty—lawmakers must take a strong stand against the coronation of this anti-labor secretary.

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For decades, the main argument conservative policymakers and business leaders have been making against raising the federal minimum wage is that it will bring about economic doom in the form of massive job losses. In 1980, then-Governor Ronald Reagan declared that “the minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression.” Today’s conservatives seem to agree, with Ted Cruz warning that “every time we raise the minimum wage, predictably what happens is a significant number of people lose their jobs.” Speaker Paul Ryan has dared to get specific with his doomsday predictions, saying “when you raise the minimum wage, you’ll lose over a million jobs.”

New analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund shows that this isn’t the case. From 1993 to the second quarter of 2015, cities raised their minimum wage 43 times. In 74% of these occasions, the unemployment rate did not increase a year after the minimum wage hike. Of the 11 cases where the unemployment rate rose a year after the minimum wage increase, six were during the Great Recession when the unemployment rate rose across the United States. Due to data limitations, the analysis was unable to evaluate more recent minimum wage increases that have occurred later in the economic recovery.

By themselves, these findings aren’t enough to prove that the minimum wage does not cause job losses—but when they’re paired with the numerous academic studies that have also found that raising the minimum wage has no discernible effect on unemployment, it does poke holes in conservatives’ reasoning.

As the argument against raising the minimum wage becomes increasingly fuzzy, the argument in favor of raising it stays crystal-clear. The current minimum wage is a poverty wage: a family with one child and a single parent working full-year, full-time for the federal minimum wage would be below the poverty line for a family of two. Raising the minimum wage would help these workers directly, and it would have ripple effects throughout the entire economy—it would reduce inequality, increase the GDP, and even create modest job growth.

It’s clear that conservatives’ claims about the impact of the minimum wage do not square with the evidence. Cities that have raised the minimum wage have not experience massive job losses or economic ruin. And with the minimum wage losing value every year it is not hiked, many cannot afford continued opposition to increasing the federal minimum wage.

The data suggest the challenge disabled people face in trying to escape poverty.  But there is hope that an emerging bipartisan consensus on disability employment may mark an important step in the right direction.

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Currently, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a certified “sheltered workshop” can pay disabled Americans less than the minimum wage—sometimes as little as pennies per hour. As a result, approximately 400,000 disabled Americans are paid a subminimum wage, which makes it more difficult for them to work their way out of poverty.

For decades, activists were unable to get even top labor Democrats like former Senator Tom Harkin—a key sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act—to challenge this labor law. Harkin, like many Democrats, argued that it was a key policy that helped people with disabilities get needed training for better jobs.  However, studies show that rather than finding higher-quality jobs, the overwhelming majority of these disabled workers spend their careers continuing to earn the subminimum wage.

Ari Ne’eman, who was appointed by President Obama to the National Council on Disability, says the subminimum wage is an outdated idea. “It’s a relic from a time when our politicians embraced other draconian ideas like eugenics,” says Ne’eman. “This is 1930’s thinking.”

Fortunately, a movement to extend the minimum wage to disabled workers has now spread to four states and has reached the federal level as well.

In 2003, Vermont was the first state to eliminate the subminimum wage for persons with disabilities. Instead of paying nonprofits to employ these workers at a subminimum wage, the state invested those funds in wraparound services to help employers accommodate workers with disabilities. Rather than reducing the number of jobs for disabled workers, as critics of the policy had predicted, the employment rate for disabled workers rose—it is now double the national rate.  In the last five years New Hampshire, Oregon, and Maryland have followed Vermont’s lead.

At the federal level, President Obama raised the minimum wage for tens of thousands of disabled federal contractors working in “concessions and concession industries;” and Labor Secretary Tom Perez has said  that he wants all states to eliminate the usage of the subminimum wage to employ persons with disabilities.

Now there is also bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate for the TIME Act, which would ban the subminimum wage and provide funding to help transition disabled workers into mainstream employment.

Republican Congressman Gregg Harper, whose son has Fragile X syndrome, is a cosponsor of the legislation. Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI), who is paralyzed, and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA), whose son has Down syndrome, are also supporting the push to pass the bill.

“For many of these people, it’s because they have family members with disabilities,” says Allison Wohl, Executive Director of the Association of People Supporting Employment First.  But she says education also plays a role.  “It’s universal—the reaction you get when you tell a hill staffer about the subminimum wage. Their face drops and it’s clear they don’t know what to say.”

Ne’eman hopes that the space created on both sides of the aisle to tackle low wages among disabled workers will lead to more creative thinking about how to raise wages for all workers.

“We call it the curb effect,” he says.  “Just like the [ramp at the] curb also makes it easier for [pedestrians with] a piece of luggage or a stroller.  It ends up helping everyone.”

So far it’s unclear if the legislation is going to move in this Congress, but advocates remain hopeful. These days, even the possibility of Republicans and Democrats coming together to support pro-worker legislation is a rare thing. And many in the disability and labor communities hold out hope that passing this bill will be the first of more victories that lie ahead.

“There are two economic realities in America today,” said moderator Lester Holt. “There’s been a record six straight years of job growth, and new census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation. However, income inequality remains significant, and nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”

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Holt is right about the challenges Americans are facing. Nearly 50 percent of all U.S. households report that they would struggle to come up with $400 during an emergency. And 80 percent of Americans will experience at least one year of economic insecurity—either living in poverty, needing public assistance, or having an unemployed head of household.

The fact that inequality and income volatility were mentioned at all is a big deal.

In 2008, as millions lost their jobs in the midst of the financial crisis, the first presidential debate featured no questions on poverty or income inequality. And in 2012, just as Americans were beginning to climb out of the Great Recession, poverty was ignored by debate moderators—although President Obama still managed to talk about issues like low-wage work, access to community colleges and training, affordable healthcare and childcare, and pay equity. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the presidential election this year, news networks have devoted less and less attention to poverty and inequality in favor of horse-race election coverage.

But just talking about poverty isn’t enough.

It’s critical that we move beyond talk, and focus on real solutions. Case in point: According to a recent analysis by Media Matters for America, Fox News covers poverty more than any other network on the air—but rather than educating the public on solutions, their stories reinforce stereotypes and false narratives about those of us who are struggling. Similarly, conservative politicians like Paul Ryan have delivered high-profile speeches and put forward so-called “poverty plans” for low-income communities, while still supporting trillions of dollars in cuts to antipoverty investments over ten years.

The same goes for the presidential debates. We need to know where the candidates stand on the policies that would dramatically reduce poverty and expand opportunity for everyone in America.

Where do the candidates stand on Unemployment Insurance, which is woefully underfunded and currently reaches only 1 in 4 workers who need it? What would they do to address college affordability—at a time when student debt has ballooned to about $1.3 trillion and too many low-income students are simply priced out of a college education? Where do they stand on raising the minimum wage—even $12 an hour by 2020 would lift wages for more than 35 million workers and save about $17 billion annually in government assistance programs. What about expanding Social Security—the most powerful antipoverty program in the nation—which lifted 26 million people out of poverty in 2015?

It’s time to ask the candidates: #Wheredoyoustand

That’s why this election season, TalkPoverty.org is working to push questions about where the candidates stand on poverty solutions into the presidential debate.

Unlike the first debate, the next forum will be a town hall featuring questions submitted through social media. Building off a successful 2012 #TalkPoverty campaign led by The  Nation magazine and the Center for American Progress, today we’re launching our #Wheredoyoustand campaign encouraging you to share the questions you want to hear in the next presidential debate. The idea is simple: if the media isn’t going to dig into the candidates’ policies, we will.

Share your question now.

Whether it’s through a photo, a video, or a tweet, we want to know the questions you think need to be asked. Once you’ve tweeted your questions using #Wheredoyoustand, share them on the Open Debate Coalition website so that more people can vote to hear them in the debate.

Below are some examples of questions to get you started.  It’s time to move beyond focusing on whether someone said “the p-word,” and make sure the debates address real solutions to poverty.

Every dollar spent on food assistance generates $1.70 in economic activity. Ask the candidates #Wheredoyoustand on food stamps #Debates2016

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 27, 2016

The US has 5% of the world’s population, but over 25% of the world’s prison population. Ask about that. #Wheredoyoustand #Debates2016

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 27, 2016

.@IamMikeRich is asking: #Wheredoyoustand on investments in jobs that reach low-income communities? #Debates2016 pic.twitter.com/ZLOXxJ3aum

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 26, 2016

Two Census reports—the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey—are critical resources for advocates, researchers, journalists, and policymakers alike. They provide rich information on issues that impact people’s health and economic wellbeing, ranging from their living situations, to public benefits usage, to how much money they earn.

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These data, which are for 2015, inform us about what is working to cut poverty and reduce inequality, and how we might do better from a public policy perspective. Here are four key trends wonks will be examining closely:

Incomes are rising—likely for minimum wage workers, too

Some researchers are forecasting that real median household income might see the largest one-year jump in more than a decade. Low-wage workers should see a rise, too—especially in states that raised their minimum wage. This increase is particularly important for women, who make up nearly two-thirds of all minimum wage workers.

Rising wages, particularly for low-wage workers, could mean that this is the year we learn that the gender wage gap among full-time workers—which stood at women earning 79 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts—finally broke the 80 cent-barrier. (Not quite shattering this particular glass ceiling, but moving a step closer!)

Anti-poverty advocates will also examine these data to see if the income gains will reach families in deep poverty—those who have incomes of less than half the poverty line (approximately $12,000 annually, for a family of four).

Don’t kid yourself—racial and gender inequalities are alive and well

Any improvement in the poverty rate and the gender wage gap is critical, but we’re a long way from widespread economic equality. For example, the wage gap for women of color is severe: Last year, African American women typically earned only 60 cents, Native American women 59 cents, and Hispanic women 55 cents, for every dollar earned by their white Non-Hispanic male counterparts.

These gender and racial disparities apply to poverty rates, too. Hispanics and African Americans experienced poverty rates about 2.5 times higher last year than white Non-Hispanics. Women are also more likely to face poverty, as are individuals born in a foreign country, persons with disabilities, and single-parent families.

There is a hidden story in these data about who is more likely to be poor and paid unfairly that wonks and others need to shine a light on.

The data are seriously flawed—especially for LGBTQ people

Every year this Census release sparks conversation about how the stats themselves could be improved. Two topics come up repeatedly: The flawed way that we measure poverty and the shocking lack of data about LGBTQ people.

There is widespread agreement that the federal poverty line—$24,300 for a family of four in 2016—is far too low, which means many more Americans are experiencing serious economic hardship than are deemed officially “poor.” This disconnect isn’t surprising, considering the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) was developed more than half a century ago. A lot of things have improved since then—cars, phones, computers, Americans’ appreciation of soccer—but the OPM hasn’t, even as families’ needs and spending patterns have changed dramatically.

The OPM also fails to account for numerous public policies that relieve hardship. This is one reason why many wonks are fans of the Census Bureau’s alternative Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).

The SPM includes income households receive through assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which lifted 4.7 million people above the poverty line in 2014; as well as tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, which together lifted 9.8 million people out of poverty in 2014. The SPM also incorporates some of households’ necessary expenditures, such as clothing and utilities, and geographic variation in housing costs.

While these poverty measurements are less than ideal, they are far better than having almost no data at all—as is the case for members of the LGBTQ community. The lack of sexual orientation and gender identity data in these data sets is glaring, given that the limited data we do have demonstrate that LGBTQ individuals face higher poverty rates than many other communities. Since funding for anti-poverty initiatives often depends upon being able to show that economic need exists, this dearth of data can prevent the LGBTQ community from receiving help even when there is a clear need.

We must redouble our efforts to ensure we collect much-needed data on the LGBTQ community while also working to reform the way we are collecting and measuring poverty data.

Public policy choices reduce or exacerbate poverty, inequality, and hardship

Last year the Census data demonstrated the huge impact the Affordable Care Act had on Americans’ health care coverage, as uninsured rates fell to a historic low with declines in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This year wonks anticipate a new low in the uninsurance rate—perhaps even below 9 percent—though it would be even lower if more states expanded Medicaid coverage.

Next week’s release will also show how other smart social programs are effectively reducing poverty. For example, last year’s SPM data revealed that without Social Security fully half of American seniors would have been poor, and that without refundable tax credits, nearly 1 in 4 children would have fallen below the poverty line as well. This evidence has fueled increasing calls from advocates and policymakers to strengthen and expand Social Security, refundable tax credits, and other key safety net programs.

Wonks look forward to continuing to assess our public policy choices based on this year’s data.  We already know a lot about what to do to reduce hardship, boost economic mobility, and increase opportunity.  The new Census data can help us move in the right direction—if we ask the right questions, and look for the answers.

But in 21 states, low-wage workers are still stuck at $7.25 per hour. That means 57 million workers—nearly 40 percent of our workforce—work in a state where the minimum wage is well beneath the federal poverty level for a family of two. What’s worse, at least 14 states have gone so far as to pass preemptive legislation that prohibits local areas from enacting their own minimum wage policies.

Low-paid workers in these states aren’t simply being denied a long-overdue raise—they’re actually losing purchasing power. Because the minimum wage has not been indexed to keep pace with inflation, minimum wage workers are falling further behind every day that Congress fails to act.

In fact, a minimum wage earner in a $7.25 state who is working full-time, year-round would have to clock an additional 244 hours each year just to take home the same annual pay she did in a single year in 2009, after adjusting for inflation. Put another way, she’d need an extra 31 working days—more than six weeks—just to maintain her earnings from seven years ago.

For all our ingenuity, we haven’t yet figured out how to cram more days into a year. So, until we master the magic of time dilation, every year that Congress fails to raise the minimum wage will effectively mean another pay cut for workers in these states—and with it, a greater struggle to make ends meet.

The American people have made it abundantly clear where they stand on minimum wages. By wide majorities, voters on both sides of the political aisle—including small business owners, who occupy a special place in the rhetoric of many politicians—support raising the wage above $7.25. The research agrees: In the past, minimum-wage policy has proven an effective tool for increasing earnings and reducing poverty among working families—as well as increasing productivity and reducing turnover in the workplace—without leading to job loss.

Only one group seems to have missed the memo on America’s eagerness for higher wages: conservative lawmakers. In 2014, they rejected the Miller-Harkin bill, which would have raised the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, with the congressional vote split almost perfectly along party lines. And so far no conservatives are among the 32 senators and 160 representatives co-sponsoring the federal $12 by 2020 bill that was introduced last year.

On this seventh anniversary of federal wage stagnation, policymakers should resolve not to let another July 25—another 7/25—go by with any workers in our nation still subsisting on $7.25. Federal lawmakers have an increasingly urgent responsibility to reach out to the millions of workers whose state legislatures refuse stand up for—or worse, actively stand in the way of—their right to be paid a decent wage for a hard day’s work. If we do not, struggling workers—surrounded by the rising costs of making ends meet in America—will be left further and further behind.

First of all, this may be the most Mitt Romney-esque statement of all time (and last we checked, Mitt Romney was “not concerned about the very poor”).

Second, Romney’s claim that the middle class and the poor “need conservative principles to see rising real wages” flies in the face of the evidence. Researcher Larry Bartels found that income growth is not only faster, but more equal under Democratic presidents. Wages for low-income Americans actually decline under Republican presidents—and increase under Democrats—in part because of changes to the minimum wage.

In other words, “getting wages up” is a policy. It’s called the “minimum wage.” It’s been raised 22 times since 1938—by both Democratic and Republican presidents—but has remained at a meager $7.25 an hour (a poverty wage) since 2009. The reason for that? Romney’s fellow Republican Members of Congress have blocked reasonable increases of the minimum wage. In 2014, a minority of Republican Senators filibustered legislation that would have increased the wage to $10.10 an hour.

Romney, to his credit, broke with his party and came around to supporting a federal minimum wage increase two years after his campaign ended, but his records as a governor and a candidate tell a different story. As Massachusetts executive, he vetoed a minor wage hike to $7.50 an hour (the Democratic legislature eventually overrode his veto). And contrary to his most recent statements, he did talk about why he favored certain policies during his candidacy in 2012—they just didn’t involve wages.

A review of Romney’s 2012 campaign site shows no mention of the minimum wage—or wage growth at all (he did, however, have an entire page dedicated to repealing the Affordable Care Act). When pressed on his wage policy by CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, Romney responded, “Right now there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage. What I can tell you is had one indexed the minimum wage back to, let’s say, 1990, the minimum wage would be lower now than it actually is. Democrats make big hay of this every few years, ‘Oh, we’re going to raise the minimum wage,’ and get a lot of hoopla for it.”

Romney’s about-face is not uncommon among’ former Republican politicians. In 2014, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty said the GOP should favor “reasonable increases to the minimum wage.” But Pawlenty vetoed an attempted minimum wage increase in 2008. And when he left the governorship, Minnesota had one of the lowest minimum wages in the country. And former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum—the only 2016 Republican presidential candidate to support a minimum wage increase—also opposed the legislation to raise the wage floor to $10.10 an hour.

To be clear, Romney and other former elected officials’ support for a minimum wage increase is welcome—if only their views were reflected by Republican leaders in Congress.

But what is often left out of media coverage on HB2 is the fact that it does more than restrict bathroom access.  It also amends the state’s Wage and Hour Act to prevent any city, county, or other political jurisdiction within the state from passing or enforcing legislation or voter-mandated pro-worker policies, including minimum wage increases and paid family and medical leave laws. These restrictions have a tangible impact on people and families, including transgender and gender non-conforming communities, who are more likely than their peers to be job insecure and living in poverty.

In undermining the rights of workers, this law also undercuts what has become an important strategy through which antipoverty advocates are able to create change and influence state policy. Over the past year, cities, counties and states have moved to adopt higher minimum wages. Los Angeles, for example, passed legislation last year that raised its city-wide minimum wage to $15. And just this month, California passed a similar increase statewide, as did New York. Both states’ minimum wages are now far above the federal standard of $7.25 per hour.

Advocates in cities and counties have also had recent success in passing paid leave protections that are more expansive than what is provided by their states or the federal government. San Francisco recently adopted the most generous paid family leave law in the country, which requires all city employers with 20 or more workers to cover a full six weeks of paid family leave. Such laws have a significant impact on people and families with low-incomes, because low-wage workers are far less likely to have access to paid leave through work. Without these protections in place, workers may incur lost wages—or even be fired—if they take time off for unavoidable personal or medical emergencies.

Unfortunately, North Carolina isn’t the only state that is stripping cities and counties of their ability to pass proactive worker protections. In several other states, legislatures have either passed or introduced similar anti-worker bills—often in response to local minimum wage increases—with assistance and encouragement from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.  While Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe recently vetoed a similar bill that had made its way through the state’s legislature, anti-worker operatives continue to push damaging legislation.

The Department of Justice has rightly challenged the anti-transgender discrimination codified in HB2, but it is important to recognize that other portions of the bill deserve similar legal and political scrutiny for their dangerous impact on low-income people and communities of color.

In Alabama, the NAACP is challenging a similar law with a lawsuit against the state.  The suit claims that Alabama’s state law—which was passed earlier this year as a direct response to a city-wide minimum wage increase in Birmingham—is unconstitutional because it specifically targets Birmingham’s workers, who are overwhelmingly people of color. Last year, Birmingham became the first city in the Deep South to pass a minimum wage increase. According to the NAACP, the Alabama state legislature’s action builds upon a legacy of race-motivated preemption that was rampant during and after the days of Jim Crow.

In addition to issuing legal challenges, groups are also taking on these laws through direct action and legislative advocacy. For example, the North Carolina NAACP has joined forces with transgender rights advocates to engage in a series of protests, sit-ins, and legislative proposals that call for a full repeal of the anti-democratic HB2 law and highlight the entire range of its consequences.

“We cannot be silent in the face of this race-based, class-based, homophobic and transphobic attack on wage earners, civil rights, and the LGBTQ community,” said Reverend Dr. William Barber II, President of the North Carolina NAACP.  “Together with our many allies, we will coordinate a campaign of nonviolent direct action along with other forms of nonviolent protest that will instruct our legislators with respect to the rights of all people.”

Whether through legal advocacy or direct action, the federal government and advocates on the ground must continue to highlight and challenge the full range of damaging consequences wrought by HB2. This includes not only fighting back against North Carolina’s law, but taking on the many other pre-emptive bills across the country that will do harm to people with low-incomes and communities of color.

When my husband was away in Afghanistan for a year, I experienced what being a single mom was really like. Working, taking care of a household, and spending quality time with my toddler tested my patience at times. Now that he’s home, I still work hard to provide for my family and, although I can’t spend as much time with them as I want, I’m lucky to work a job with a paycheck and hours I can count on week to week. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everyone—too many mothers face a daily struggle of balancing caring for their kids and ever-changing work hours. 

According to a national study from the Center for Popular Democracy, moms either work too much or not enough. In both cases, most moms struggle in low-wage hourly jobs riddled with irregular work hours and unpredictable schedules. These moms are the women who serve your food at local restaurants, who are cashiers at the grocery store down the street, or are health care workers at a nursing facility. In fact, 61 percent of all women in the workforce nationwide hold hourly jobs. These jobs are often in low-wage yet fast-growing sectors such as health care, retail, and food service, and usually pay below $15.

What are the problems for moms working low-wage hourly jobs? As if facing inadequate and unaffordable childcare weren’t enough, these women also lack basic legal protections that would ensure they received adequate notice of their work schedules and the right to decline last-minute changes that throw carefully balanced routines into chaos. Unpredictable work hours are particularly challenging for the many moms who need to coordinate multiple part-time positions.

Fortunately, more and more working moms are coming forward to demand policy solutions that can make their lives less hectic. In Maryland, legislation introduced this year would require employers to post schedules three weeks out so parents could plan child care and other obligations. Under the proposal, workers would also be compensated for last-minute changes that could disrupt family events.

The proposal would also address a critical and underreported problem: the fact that many work part-time not by choice, but because they are forced into it. In fact, 1 out of 4 part-time workers would prefer to work full-time. Workers are often available to work but aren’t scheduled for more hours, often because even more part-time workers are brought on. Working fewer hours every week, in turn, often equates to a lower hourly wage and fewer opportunities compared to what a full-time counterpart receives. To address the dilemma, the legislation would give part-time workers access to full-time positions opening up at their jobs before a company could bring on more employees.

Although we sacrifice and work hard as mothers, many of us struggle. But even so, I wouldn’t trade being a mom for anything in the world—but a little help would be welcomed.

This Mother’s Day, a real gift would be a living wage with work hours we could count on. It’s time elected officials thought of moms across the state and enacted legislation that actually helps us in our day-to-day lives.

Now, that would be a gift worth giving.

Phone calls like the one I received from my manager were far from atypical in my job. In addition to last-minute cancellations, my coworkers and I would wait until Friday evenings to receive our weekly schedules—which would begin less than two days later, on Sunday mornings. Even when we received notice of our schedules later than Friday evenings, we still had to be on time if we were scheduled for the 6 a.m. markdown shift on Sunday. We might also discover that we would be working just 12 hours in a week, even though the previous week we had worked for 20.  Last August, a few months before I left, the company publicly announced that it would provide all employees their schedules 14 days in advance by early 2016. But my former coworkers tell me that they still receive their schedules just 48 hours before the workweek starts. The ugly reality is that corporate promises—even widely publicized ones—do not ensure change.

The scheduling practices that continue to threaten my coworkers’ ability to make ends meet are hardly unique to my former employer. In fact, schedule volatility affects a staggering 90 percent of the retail workforce. And for the 35 percent of these workers who are parents, fluctuating hours seriously impede their best efforts to secure high-quality child care.

The practice of on-call scheduling is particularly disruptive to work-family balance. Someone who is on-call has to sit in schedule purgatory until her manager either clears her to stay home or asks her to come in—which can happen with as little as two hours’ notice. If she can’t scramble to find child care in that time (a difficult task given the scarcity of accessible, affordable care in this country), she may have to take a disciplinary strike for failing to report to work. If she accumulates too many strikes, she can be fired. Informal consequences like reduced hours or inconvenient shifts are not uncommon either. Although some major retailers have announced plans to end on-call scheduling, many still expect their employees to report to work with little notice and at any time of day (or night).

To make matters worse, only a few states and localities protect parents’ ability to request time off to care for their children. As a result, in most places, employees can be fired when family responsibilities make them unavailable to work a shift. In November 2014, some year-round Kmart employees reported that they had to be available to work on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, or else risked termination. Even though child care on a federal holiday is nearly impossible to find, the ultimatum stood: work on Thanksgiving, or lose your job.

The result is that parents with unpredictable work schedules are much more likely to rely on home-based child care providers, relatives, or both. A patchwork of informal care arrangements can deprive children of the educational and developmental benefits associated with high-quality child care. Early childhood education is a springboard for educational attainment, economic mobility, and social well-being for children in low-income families. Yet, schedule instability in low-wage industries constrains parents’ ability to position their children for future success.

To help low-income parents afford child care, the federal Child Care and Development Fund provides billions of dollars in subsidies—but the program is far from perfect. It’s funded through block grants, meaning that states have the power to impose work requirements for parents who have no control over their hours; states can also make the application process cumbersome through requiring employers to corroborate parents’ schedules and income with additional documents. (It should be noted that none of these requirements exist at the federal level.) Conservative policymakers tout block grants as an ideal way to tailor policies to fit the unique needs of different states, but in reality, they keep high quality child care out of reach for many working parents.

But even when child care is affordable for retail workers, it often is unobtainable in practice. Just 3 percent of center-based child care providers are open on weekends, and even fewer are open after 7 p.m. Meanwhile, only 44 percent of retail workers work regular daytime hours, which leaves the majority of the retail workforce with very limited options for child care. To complicate things further, providers often require advance payment for full-time enrollment, which is often impossible for parents whose hours can fluctuate by 50 percent from week to week.

None of this is inevitable. Policies that recognize and empower working parents are crucial to reining in unchecked schedule volatility in the retail industry and beyond. The Schedules That Work Act, introduced in the Senate last summer, offers much-needed, common sense protections. The bill requires employers to modify schedules based on employees’ child care needs, and prevents employees who use their right to request schedule modifications from adverse outcomes like pay cuts and termination. It guarantees four hours of pay if workers are sent home early, and eliminates unpaid “on-call” shifts. Finally, the bill mandates employers to provide clear and advance notice of work schedules.

Overall, this legislation would make it easier for my former coworkers who are parents to provide their children with the long-term benefits of consistent, high-quality care. Retail workers are expected to take initiative and be proactive problem solvers—not only as workers, but also as parents. It’s only fair that the law require our employers to do the same.

The widespread usage of the 79 cents figure corresponds to a public dialogue around equal pay that focuses on women who earn salaries much higher than the minimum wage—women who work in offices but are excluded from C-suites. But, while it is true that the gender wage gap is larger among women with more education, women who have an advanced degree will also earn much more over a lifetime than those with less than a high school diploma. And the white, middle- and upper-class women who comprise the bulk of female office workers have radically different work experiences than low-income women.

The latter group of workers, often women of color and recent immigrants, earn very low pay with few opportunities for upward mobility. These disparate experiences among women raise the question of how to create an inclusive equal pay movement that both acknowledges the very real discrimination that professional women experience in the workplace while also ensuring their own advancement isn’t achieved on the backs of other women.

Unfortunately, the common focus on getting women access to high-paid and male-dominated fields—through encouraging women to “lean in”—obscures the fact that, for the many women who earn poverty wages and work without essential labor protections, equal pay won’t come any time soon.

Many of these women workers are people of color employed in care work. Women are over-represented in all sorts of care work, from professional jobs in teaching and nursing, to low-wage positions as nannies and home health aides. Care work—defined as any paid or unpaid role in which a worker cares for another person—can include cooking and cleaning as well as emotional labor like nurturance. A unique feature of this work is that it has historically been performed by family members, but is increasingly part of the labor market as more parents work outside of the home. But its growth in the labor market has been polarized, with large increases in low-wage and high-wage positions, but very little growth in the middle.

This trend has led sociologist Rachel Dwyer to hypothesize that job polarization in the labor market as a whole, characterized by a paucity of good middle-class jobs and growing income inequality, is a result of disparities in care work. This distribution is driven by the entry of more women into the formal workforce—often in care sectors themselves—who increasingly require the care work of others to balance career and family. Unsurprisingly, most of the high-wage job gains in care work have gone to white women, while most of the low-wage gains have accrued to non-white women, especially African-American women and Latinas. This phenomenon has reinforced racial divisions in the labor market and increased inequality among women, as seen in the discrepancies in the gender pay gap by race.

To move closer to gender equality, we must find mechanisms for empowerment of women in the formal workplace. Efforts towards workplace justice for all are already ongoing for many organizations, including those catering largely to moderate- and high-income women, like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). Still, centering issues that affect women of color, undocumented women, and those in low-wage care work jobs—and especially those who fall into all three categories—poses an ongoing challenge. Unlike pay equity for middle-class and high-income women, feminist advocacy that intersects with poverty and immigration policy is more complex, more prone to controversy, and sometimes just less sexy. Positive progress, like the recognition by NOW that immigration justice is a feminist issue in partnership with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, show that mobilizing mainstream women’s groups on a more diverse set of issues is possible.

And yet, a feminist revolution that lifts up all women—especially those who are most disenfranchised—will not trickle down from highly visible professional women alone. Policy actions to fairly value and compensate women’s work outside the office, especially in the domestic sphere, is ongoing in many states and beginning to draw greater attention from policy researchers. Still, while labor organizations are turning a critical lens to care work, popular feminist discourse dominated by educated white women too often obscures the issue.

Acting to increase representation of low-income women and women of color in mainstream feminist circles is also a responsibility shared by all of us. This can take many forms, whether it be avoiding selecting candidates for internships or jobs who are recommended by people in your network, or making a concerted effort to hire underrepresented women to write for your publication or speak at an event.  Even further, all feminist advocates can support common-sense policy reforms to alleviate pay discrimination, like the EEOC proposal to amend employer reporting and the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Collective action is a tall order for a group as large and diverse as working women, so we recommend another simple individual step: when you receive a promotion, a pay raise, or a bonus, share that added wealth with the women who work minding your children at daycare, making your coffee in the morning, and cleaning your home. Generous tips can go a long way towards alleviating the material hardship of low-income women, and a wage increase, even further. For women employed in care work jobs, employer generosity may be the only way to get a raise, even if your state or municipality enacts a higher wage floor. While organizations like the American Association of University Women may have excellent resources on how to negotiate salary for a college-educated woman, similar strategies for low-income women are substantially less feasible, if available at all.

So, when you’re leaning in at work—this Equal Pay Day and every day—don’t forget to also pay it forward.

“Whenever you feel like it’s probably fine to not tip your server, that’s one more bill stacking up because they’re short on money. This is food for the week that our families will go without because you didn’t think it was necessary, even after asking for everything under the sun and receiving it free of charge, mind you. This is one less basic necessity my daughter needs because even TWO more dollars is too much for you.”

These words from a young, Colorado waitress named Taylar Cordova—accompanied by an image of a zero-tip check for a meal totaling $182—set the internet ablaze this week, receiving thousands of likes, shares, and comments on Facebook and sparking impassioned think pieces about the plight of our nation’s 11 million restaurant workers.

And it couldn’t have been timelier. Thanks to the efforts of industry groups like the National Restaurant Association—or “the other NRA,” as I like to call them—which has stymied efforts to raise wages for restaurant workers, today marks the 25th year the federal tipped minimum wage has been frozen at an abysmal $2.13 per hour. And when you’re paid $2.13 per hour by your employer, or even $5.29 as it is in Colorado, you are completely reliant on tips to pay your bills.

Happy anniversary, everybody!

Twenty-five years is a long time to go without paying a significant portion of your workers—servers, bussers, hosts, bartenders—at least the minimum wage, let alone a wage that enables a family to make ends meet. And as a result, servers are twice as likely to need food stamps than the rest of the U.S. workforce, and three times as likely to live in poverty. The restaurant industry now includes 7 of the 10 lowest paying jobs in the country.

And the fact that it’s been 25 years isn’t even the half of it. In fact, it’s only about a quarter of it. Since the creation of the minimum wage almost a century ago, federal law has mandated that tipped workers be paid less than everyone else, a practice rooted in American slavery, when employers didn’t want to pay newly freed slaves a wage. Why? Because of the undue and enduring influence of our friends at the NRA.

The NRA claims to represent small independent businesses, but APRIL FOOLS! It’s actually a front group for multinational corporations like Darden (Olive Garden), DineEquity (Applebee’s/IHOP), and Bloomin’ Brands (Outback Steakhouse). Despite the corporate welfare that these companies manage to secure for themselves, as many as 50 percent of their employees are near the poverty level and must access an array of public assistance programs—at a cost of over $9 million to taxpayers.

And thus, although heart-wrenching and unacceptable, Taylar Cordova’s story is not unique. In my travels and after talking with hundreds of restaurant workers, I’ve met countless women like Taylar—mothers working long hours to put food on the tables of others, all the while uncertain whether they’ll be able to afford food for their own tables later that night.

All Work and No Pay from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

All of these stories contradict the prevailing myth that tipped workers are largely white men working at fine-dining establishments, earning nearly six figures for their efforts. In reality, nearly 70 percent of tipped restaurant workers are women, 30 percent of whom are mothers, working in casual dining establishments like Denny’s, the Olive Garden, or, in Taylar’s case, PF Chang’s. These workers—42 percent of whom are people of color—also experience disproportionate rates of poverty, financial insecurity, and discrimination.

And then there’s the sexual harassment. The restaurant industry is the single largest source of sexual harassment claims in the country. What’s more, workers in states that pay the lowest possible tipped wage of $2.13 per hour experience harassment at twice the rate of their counterparts. Conversely, tipped women workers in states that have eliminated the subminimum wage are less likely to experience sexual harassment. The tipped minimum wage, combined with the practice of tipping, forces women servers to tolerate inappropriate behavior from customers, coworkers and managers in order to survive.

Altogether, this isn’t just about the huge restaurant corporations lining their own pockets. With the lives of over 11 million restaurant workers hanging in the balance, their impact is seismic. Their obstructionist efforts have deep consequences and keep the restaurant industry and our nation at large from moving in a direction that promotes equality across racial, gender, and economic lines.

But after years of hard work, and tireless efforts by workers and their allies, stories like Taylar’s are resonating because a national movement for One Fair Wage is gaining incredible momentum. The seven states that have already eliminated the two-tiered minimum wage system (including California and most of the West Coast) account for over one million tipped workers, and their restaurant industries are flourishing. In fact, California is taking a step further; state legislators announced this week they are moving forward with a plan to increase the minimum wage for all workers to $15 per hour. Many other states, including New York, Maine, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, plus Washington D.C., are considering wage increases. I urge them not to leave out women and people of color; tipped workers deserve a raise, too.

From Danny Meyer to Amy Schumer, the plight of employees who earn tips is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. It’s time for our legislators to catch up with the rest of America and establish one fair wage for all workers. We hope that on this special 25th anniversary, we’ll finally give the restaurant industry a gift it deserves: a fair wage that ensures dignity and justice for the tens of thousands of hardworking employees who make the restaurant industry what it is.

Rebecca here.

A few weeks ago I signed up for one of your credit cards. Just a few weeks after the card came in the mail, I got an email alert from you about a tip I had left. Here’s what it said:

We noticed you gave an extra generous tip on March 14, 2016, for your service at Mackey’s… We hope you left this tip because your service was exceptional. So if it’s not a mistake—or if you’ve already addressed it—there’s nothing you need to do. Have concerns about the tip? Just sign in to look at the charge in more detail. You can also contact Mackey’s directly if you need to…

I looked closer at your email to see I’d left $5 on a $14 bill.

While my tip may have exceeded 20% of the bill (the percentage conventionally considered to be a “good” tip), it was just an extra two bucks—and well within the realm of what I consider reasonable.

As a former server—and as someone who spends her days working to fight poverty and boost opportunity in America—I was struck by the great irony of receiving these emails in the weeks leading up to the 25^th anniversary of the last time Congress raised the tipped minimum wage.

.@CapitalOne apparently doesn’t believe its customers could possibly care about tipping their servers well pic.twitter.com/1lrNlm2NKe

— Rebecca Vallas (@rebeccavallas) March 19, 2016

I was still reeling from your initial email alert when my “extra generous” tipping was flagged again. This time I had I left a whopping $4 tip on an $11 bill.

.@capitalone straight up trolling me now IT’S $4 ON $11 FOLKS pic.twitter.com/1OwaPYSeYP

— Rebecca Vallas (@rebeccavallas) March 20, 2016

And the emails kept coming every day for the rest of the week.

I get that somewhere in there you may have good intentions. Indeed, in response to my publicly sharing your tip-shaming email alerts, your customer service department tweeted that you “like to lean on the safe side when it comes to possible fraudulent activity.”

But with April 1st marking 25 years since Congress last raised the tipped minimum wage, now seems as good a time as any to explain why I tip how I do—and why your email alerts aren’t just meddlesome and offensive, but part of the problem.

In the U.S., the 4.3 million Americans who work for tips are subject to a much lower federal wage floor than other workers. Whereas the federal minimum wage—which is itself a poverty wage—sits at $7.25 per hour, the tipped minimum wage is an abysmal $2.13 per hour, just 30 percent of the full federal minimum. And while the federal minimum wage has been increased five times since 1991, policymakers have left the tipped minimum wage to stay stuck at $2.13.

This anemic wage floor leaves workers at restaurants, hair salons, nail salons, valet parkers, airport attendants, bellhops, and food delivery workers—anyone working for tips—economically vulnerable. In fact, 12.8% of workers in predominantly tipped occupations live below the federal poverty line, and nearly 15% of restaurant servers are poor, compared to just 6.7% of the overall workforce. And nearly half rely on public assistance to make ends meet.

These disparities aren’t inevitable. Indeed, the contrast between states that have a subminimum tipped wage and those that pay tipped workers the same as other workers shows the difference that policy can make. Just 10.2% of restaurant servers are poor in states that have no subminimum tipped wage compared with 18% in states with a $2.13 per hour tipped wage.

Importantly, it’s not just low pay that makes it hard to get by on the tipped minimum wage. As anyone who’s ever been a restaurant server knows all too well, working for tips is inherently unpredictable. While other workers are paid the same rate for every hour they work, tipped workers’ income can fluctuate day to day and week to week, subject to the vagaries of busy and slow shifts, good and bad weather, a booming economy versus hard times when potential customers are tighter with their pocketbooks, and more. It can be incredibly difficult to budget, plan ahead, and save for the future when you can’t predict your income.

Contrary to claims made by some in the restaurant industry—the main opponents of raising the tipped minimum wage—growth of restaurant jobs in states that pay tipped workers the same as other workers is on par with that of the rest of the country. In fact, three of the states with the top growth—Nevada, Washington, and Oregon—do not have a tipped wage below the minimum wage. Restaurants themselves can even benefit from raising wages for their workers. In addition to boosting productivity, one study of restaurant workers found that higher wages cut employee turnover by as much as half, shrinking training costs substantially.

Policymakers at all levels of government are working to address this. Legislation championed by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA) would gradually raise the tipped minimum wage to 70% of the federal minimum, an important step in the right direction. Meanwhile, as the Fight for $15 movement continues to gain steam in states and cities across the U.S., there is widespread support for raising or phasing out altogether the tipped minimum wage as well, with 8 states taking action in just the past two years to boost wages for tipped workers.

Yet, Capital One: While these legislative actions are positive steps, some—hopefully many—of your customers who can afford it may choose to tip more generously than 20%, in recognition of how hard it is to get by on the tipped minimum wage. As sociologist Kathy Edin and economist Jonathan Skinner noted recently, tipping well—while hardly a panacea for poverty and inequality—is one concrete step that people can take to make a difference in the lives of low-wage workers who rely on tips.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a few ideas for how you can put your algorithms that trigger email alerts to better use.

What about sending emails with facts about the tipped minimum wage to customers who are routinely cruddy tippers?

@rebeccavallas @CapitalOne Does it go the other way? “We noticed you left a sh*tty tip. Did you know that servers only earn $2.13 an hour?”

— Dan Crawford (@dpcrawf) March 21, 2016

Or alerting your customers when businesses they patronize commit wage theft?

Or letting us know when companies fail to top off workers’ pay when tips don’t get them up to the federal minimum wage, as employers are required by law to do?

@rebeccavallas @CapitalOne Don’ you wish we consumers had an automatic way of contacting companies every time they underpaid their workers?

— Joel Berg (@Joelsberg) March 22, 2016

But if nothing else, please stop hectoring customers like me for doing what we can to tackle poverty and inequality.

Sincerely,

Rebecca D. Vallas

Back in November 2012 in New York City, a brave band of two hundred fast-food workers walked out of their jobs and into the streets to demand a better wage and the right to form a union. Just six months later, fast-food workers went on strike in six major cities across the country. As workers were joining the movement in greater numbers, the organizers added another tactic to their cam­paign: corporate shaming. Tipped off by a McDonald’s worker, the campaign made public a website that McDonald’s had created for its employees called, naturally, McResource. Part of the web­site was geared toward helping employees make a simple budget. Unfortunately, the sample budget revealed the behemoth to be just a tad out of touch with reality: It provided just twenty dollars per month for health-care expenses and nothing at all for gas expenses. Other parts of the site urged employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle by eschewing—wait for it—fast food.

Further gaffes were exposed when a McDonald’s employee called the McResource helpline and was told she would qualify for food stamps, and the website added new advice for its workers like cutting food into smaller pieces to stave off hunger. The exposure generated lots of bad publicity, even from business-friendly outlets like Forbes and CNBC, prompt­ing the company to pull the website. With the press increasingly on its side, the Fight for $15 staged its first national strike in August 2013, with workers in over sixty cities participating. Two months later strikes occurred in more than one hundred cities. Then just six months later, on May 15, 2014, fast-food workers in 230 cities, on six continents, joined the campaign, staging strikes, rallies, and protests, and bringing many supporters along with them.

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But all of these actions paled in comparison to what happened on April 15, 2015, when the campaign officially expanded from fast-food workers to include retail and home care workers and even adjunct professors. It was the largest protest of low-wage workers in United States history, with at least sixty thousand people joining protests and rallies in cities across the country. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees Interna­tional Union, who has put the full resources of the SEIU behind this fight, said this about the movement: “There is not a price tag you can put on how this movement has changed the conversation in this country. It is raising wages at the bargaining table. It’s raised wages for eight million workers. I believe we are forcing a real conversation about how to solve the grossest inequality in our generation. People are sick of wealth at the top and no account­ability for corporations.”

I spoke with Scott Courtney, assistant to the president for orga­nizing, about why the SEIU decided to support the campaign. He told me that when Mary Kay Henry became president of the SEIU in 2010, she asked the question “not how do we just rebuild unions and have a bigger union, but how do we make income inequality the issue that politicians in our country have to deal with?” The answer to that question over time became the Fight for $15.

The ability of the leader of the nation’s fastest-growing union to ask that kind of question, one that reaches beyond the parochial goal of fighting only for its members, is the result of over a decade of work by leaders organizing people who had been excluded from traditional union membership (sometimes by laws and sometimes by the practice of labor unions). Jodeen Olguín-Tayler was active in the effort to engage union leaders to fight for the broader social struggle of the working class. Olguín-Tayler has spent fifteen years organizing the working class, first as a labor organizer at a local union and then running a national campaign to address the needs of elder-care workers and clients. She’s now my partner in crime at Demos, as our vice president of campaigns and strategic partner­ships, and she explained the long trajectory that made the Fight for $15 possible. “We knew that social agitation and public cam­paigns that reframe and transform ‘worker issues’ into community and social issues—that is, into class issues—was key to our ability to build a movement that could put economic, racial, and gender inequality back into the spotlight of public debate.

This was a pro­active, offensive strategy to move from protesting bad conditions to winning dignity and power for a broad, multiracial working class—a class where we, people of color, women, and immigrants, would finally be recognized as equals and deserving of our dig­nity,” she explained. There were many successful predecessors to the Fight for $15, such as the living wage campaign of taxi drivers in San Francisco. All these wins demonstrated to the union move­ment that victory was possible by engaging a larger set of workers in the fight and building pressure for them to heed the call bub­bling up across the country.

With the immense courage of the workers matched with the considerable financial resources of the SEIU, the Fight for $15 has taken those proven strategies and racked up major wins. In less than three years, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have raised their minimum wage to $15. In the summer of 2015, New York State’s Wage Board approved a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers at major chains. What’s remarkable is how the demand for $15 has quickly become mainstream. “We don’t get laughed at anymore when we walk in the room,” Courtney observed, remem­bering the rough times when the movement started. Back in 2012 the demand for $15 was greeted with incredulity. Fast-food work­ers, long seen as the bottom of the economic food chain, earning $15 an hour? It’s a testament to the workers, who across race, gen­der, and age have shown a level of class solidarity America hasn’t witnessed in at least a generation. And perhaps most important, it’s brought hope to the new working class.

I asked Courtney how the movement has been able to build and maintain solidarity across such a wide range of experiences, and he talked about how the SEIU has given people the space to talk. And through that talking, they’ve come to realize that only by standing together will they be able to make their lives better. “People are smart. They get it. They get that they’ve been get­ting a raw deal, they’ve been getting a raw deal for a long time. And they haven’t had hope. They have hope now. They do believe they’re going to win. And when people come together and start thinking they can win, it’s pretty spectacular to be a part of,” he told me. This is a movement primarily, but not entirely, of people of color and immigrants, the very backbone of the new working class. And their success is made all the more sweeter by the reality that most people were skeptical at best when the first calls for $15 and a union were made. As we head into the 2016 elections, the Democratic candidates for president have already publicly sup­ported the fight for $15, meaning that one way or another, this issue will continue to take its rightful place on the national stage.

The Fight for $15 uses a strategy well honed by conservatives: Establish a strong left flank in order to make any negotiation away from the big demand, in this case $15 an hour, seem moderate and commonsense by comparison. When the Fight for $15 started, even dyed-in-the-wool progressives thought a $15 minimum wage was ridiculous. But for cities with high costs of living, like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco, a $15 minimum is actually rea­sonable. So now for other cities, like Kansas City and Cincinnati, $10.10 feels not only reasonable but maybe a bit low. The Fight for $15 has fundamentally changed what’s considered mainstream in our political debate about wages.

From the book:
SLEEPING GIANT: How The New Working Class Will Transform America, by Tamara Draut.
Copyright © 2016 by Tamara Draut.
Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Although the explicitly discriminatory policies and practices that created these disparities are now illegal—thanks in part to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed employment and pay discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin—the inequities persist. That’s because many of the channels through which opportunity is passed, like social networks, are shaped by biases based on race and gender. Regardless of whether these biases are conscious or subconscious, patterns of old-fashioned segregation stand in the way of eradicating them.

Recently, I gained some profound insight into this phenomenon from a most unlikely place: a second-grade music class.

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The fact that it was a music class in a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse elementary school offered a powerful symbolism. Here were kids from two different classrooms, with distinct cultures, family backgrounds, and personalities blending their voices together in harmony. Yet, even with the freedom to sit almost anywhere they chose, the students self-segregated by race and gender to a large degree. This seemed innocent enough at first. After all, it’s human nature to gravitate toward those we share more in common with or with whom we feel most comfortable. However, the broader implications of this tendency became more evident as the class went on.

Halfway through the period, the kids began an exercise in which one student would bounce a ball to the rhythm of the song the class was singing. Each time they finished a verse, that student would pass the ball on to someone else to continue the song. After a few rounds, one of the girls in the class spoke up about the fact that the boys were only passing the ball to other boys. When the teacher asked if other people had noticed the same thing, every girl and even a few boys in the class agreed. After enlisting the students to come up with a solution to make the game fairer to those who had been excluded, the exercise resumed under the new rules. Shortly after, another student mentioned that only students from one classroom were getting the ball. By the time they worked through that problem, time had run out for them to complete the exercise.

There were at least three important takeaways from this simple example that can be applied to the way we perceive and address race and gender inequities in this country.

• The costs of inequality and discrimination may be more heavily born by those who have been discriminated against, but they are problems that belong to all of us—as such, individuals in leadership have a responsibility to listen to, acknowledge, and pursue solutions to these problems. For example, due to racial and gender biases, industries and jobs with a higher concentration of women and people of color tend to have lower pay—often minimum wage. As a result, these workers are more likely to earn poverty-level wages and need to turn to public assistance, which means that American taxpayers essentially subsidize the employers who pay inadequate wages. But policymakers can take action to rectify some of this. According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 would not only lift wages for 35 million workers, many of whom are people of color, but it would also save $17 billion in public assistance spending annually.

• Ending discrimination requires moving beyond a basic acknowledgement of the problem to honest, inclusive, and constructive engagement on the causes and solutions. For example, in order to target enforcement of equal pay laws and gain better insight into discriminatory pay practices, the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently announced a proposal to annually collect summary pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees. If implemented, this would be an important first step towards identifying bad actors and holding them accountable.

• Segregation exists in nearly every area of American life, including in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and places of worship. Regardless of intent, the result is often exclusion and marginalization of people outside our immediate social circles. In the end, this limits the full range of what could be available to all of us. Historian Richard Rothstein has painstakingly documented the history of racially explicit federal, state and local policies that have segregated African Americans into isolated slums across the country. These policies have created a legacy of racial injustice that has garnered national attention in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago and Flint.

I was heartened to see a second-grade teacher address biases within her classroom. Now it’s time for more of our political and business leaders to follow suit.

We got a chance to see this story in practice in the boom of the late 1990s, when the unemployment rate fell to its lowest levels in almost three decades, settling at a year-round average of four percent in 2000, the peak year of the boom. In this period, wages rose rapidly at all points along the income distribution, with workers at the bottom of the ladder actually achieving the largest gains.

The same principle would apply today, with the gains of a tight labor market going disproportionately to the most disadvantaged. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is typically two to two-and-a-half times that of whites. This means if we can lower the unemployment rate for whites by one percentage point, it is likely that the unemployment rate for African-Americans will fall by two percentage points. For African-American teens, the ratio hovers near six to one, meaning that a one percentage point drop in the white unemployment rate is likely to be associated with a six percentage point drop in the unemployment rate for African-American teens.

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But even if we accept that full employment is especially important for the most disadvantaged groups, there is still the question of how we get there. At present, the biggest obstacle to higher levels of employment is inadequate demand for goods and services in the economy. If there were more demand, we would see more people employed.

The first place to turn to for policies that boost demand and employment is the Federal Reserve Board. While the Fed did take extraordinary measures in an attempt to boost the economy during the downturn, its current policy of raising interest rates goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Higher interest rates make it more expensive to buy a car or house. They also discourage companies from increasing investment in equipment, software, and buildings, and deter state and local governments from investing in infrastructure. Higher interest rates also prevent people from refinancing mortgages, which would save them money on their monthly payments.

The reason the Fed raises interest rates is to slow the economy and prevent inflation. While there are indeed times when inflation could be a problem, our economy isn’t currently suffering from excessive inflation—nor is it in danger of doing so any time soon. In this context, any Fed rate hikes will needlessly slow the economy and prevent people from getting jobs. And while the small rate hike in December likely did not have much negative effect on the economy, any further rate hikes almost certainly would seriously impede growth. It is therefore important that the Fed exercise caution with any future rate hikes and only take this step if there is a real threat of inflation.

But even if the Fed can be persuaded not to restrain growth, we will still likely need more demand in the economy to return to full employment. The most obvious way to generate demand is with more government spending, ideally through public investment. This approach has the great advantage of creating more jobs today and making ourselves richer in the future. For example, spending to promote clean energy—whether in the form of research or subsidies for the use of solar and wind power—will lessen the damage that we do to the environment, leaving less harm for future generations to deal with. Spending on physical infrastructure and mass transit will speed transportation times and reduce gas use. Money for education will give us a better trained and more productive work force.

We can also pursue full employment by reducing our trade deficit, which is running at an annual rate of more than $500 billion, or a bit less than three percent of GDP. This is money that is creating demand in other countries, while more balanced trade would create greater demand in the United States. Ordinarily the mechanism for reducing the trade deficit is a lower value for the dollar. That reduces the price of U.S. exports for people living abroad while raising the price of imported goods for people living in the United States. The result is that we export more and import less, bringing the trade deficit closer to balance and creating jobs.

However, lowering the value of the dollar is probably not a plausible strategy in the current world economy. With most of our major trading partners experiencing weaker growth than the United States or even recessions, we cannot expect them to absorb a hit to their trade balance. But we should keep a lower valued dollar on the to-do list for better economic times since the trade deficit is a key obstacle to maintaining full employment.

Finally, we can move towards full employment by reducing the supply of labor, specifically by lowering the average number of hours that people work. It used to be the case that workers took a portion of the benefits of productivity growth in the form of more leisure. While that has not been true in the United States to any great extent over the last four decades, workers in other wealthy countries have continued to see reductions in the length of the average work year and/or workweek.

Indeed, across Europe, four to six weeks of paid vacation annually is standard. Workers have paid sick days as well. By reducing the number of hours per worker, there is increased demand for more workers. This story explains how Germany managed to lower its unemployment rate in between 2008 and 2009 even though it experienced a more severe recession than did the United States. By promoting policies that spread work among more workers, the government can hope to create a tighter labor market, which will also give workers the bargaining power they need to obtain higher wages.

Although full employment is not the complete solution to poverty, reaching it would go a long way. It should also be an area of bipartisan agreement. After all, conservatives are supposed to like the idea of people working hard to lift themselves up. But they can only work hard if jobs are available, and they can only lift themselves up if their wages are just.

If Americans are talking about poverty again with greater urgency than they have since the 1970s, it is because they are rightly angered by the cruelties of the 21^st-century economy. Wages have been stagnant for decades, steadily eroding what people can afford. Fewer and fewer jobs offer benefits. Even the success stories—young people who graduate from college—carry crushing levels of student debt that prevents them from purchasing homes or cars. Staggering health care costs have driven millions of American families into bankruptcy. And tens of millions of workers, even those in professional occupations, have become “contingent labor” with no job security. Their hours are changed whenever it suits management.

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This new economy has fueled massive protest both here and abroad. And sustained organizing by millions of low-wage workers, students, immigrants, and the homeless has reframed the issue of American poverty in ways that are reminiscent of the 1930s. Poverty, these activists argue, is an issue of fairness to workers and to the middle class—it’s caused by corporate greed more than anything else.

Without question, the global crash of 2008 contributed to the change in thinking about growing economic inequality in the U.S. and abroad. But it was not the crash alone that caused this change. Rather, it has been a dramatic upsurge over the past five years of grassroots organizing and protest. Without those, concern about poverty had little staying power in American politics between the 1970s and the present. Poverty was briefly rediscovered as an issue after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. A then-little-known senator named Barack Obama pronounced it a shame “that it has taken a crisis like this one to awaken us to the great divide that continues to fester in our midst.” But, if Americans were indeed ashamed, we were not ashamed for long. The year after the hurricane struck, President George W. Bush proposed zeroing out funding for the Community Development Block Grant program, which is used for affordable housing, infrastructure, job creation and many other local antipoverty programs.

Bush’s proposal was defeated, but the language and iconography used to stir up opposition to federal poverty programs after Katrina was deeply familiar to any student of 20^th-century American politics. It came down to a simple formula: blame women of color, especially single mothers. Columnist George Will argued that poverty could be defeated only if poor women stayed in school and did not have babies out of wedlock. And George W. Bush created the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI), which siphoned off federal anti-poverty funds to private marriage counseling programs for poor women. Although the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called for voluntary participation in these programs, women I interviewed in Reno said they were required to attend HMI sessions if they were enrolled in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) income assistance program.

The discourse about poverty in the U.S. did not really begin to shift away from that tired trope until around 2011 and 2012, when students, the unemployed, and the homeless began to move into Occupy Wall Street encampments from New York to California. Despite being mocked and excoriated by mainstream media for having “no clear goals,” these activists focused national attention away from the so-called “moral flaws” of the poor to the most important sources of 21^st-century American poverty: predatory lending, immorally expensive medical bills that were causing people to lose their homes, and wages that were insufficient to pay people’s bills.

Occupy introduced into American political discourse a simple, effective image of the American economy, juxtaposing most of “us”—the 99 percent—against the 1 percent, to which a staggering proportion of national wealth had been flowing since the Reagan Revolution began in 1980. The reason was clear: since the late 1970s, top marginal tax rates had been cut from 70 percent to little more than 30 percent, redirecting almost all American wealth to the top 1 percent of earners. This image took hold, and did as much to raise consciousness about economic inequality as twenty densely argued economics texts. But it also prompted a spate of more closely reasoned economic arguments about economic inequality—most famously from Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich.

Suddenly poverty in America began to look different, and many average Americans began talking about it differently too. Maybe it wasn’t poor people’s fault after all. Recovery from the 2008 recession did create millions of new jobs but 58 percent of them did not pay enough to keep a full-time worker clothed, housed and fed. By 2011, the results were crystal clear: college graduates were defaulting on student loans by the millions; full-time workers were living in homeless shelters or sleeping on relatives’ couches.

When police were called in to break up Occupy encampments, the movement was declared over—another flash in the pan. But that’s not what happened. Organizers shifted gears, unions invested resources, and the banner of economic justice was picked up by low-wage workers.

The movement for a living wage got its start with small protests by Walmart workers across the country. The first came on Black Friday 2012, the biggest shopping day of the year. Outside Walmart stores, McDonald’s restaurants, and other fast food chains, workers let the world know that 52 percent of them were forced to rely on government cash and food aid to supplement their meager paychecks. These small protests in New York, Chicago, and the working-class L.A. suburb of Pico Rivera, would soon spread across the U.S. and around the world.

Workers captured and broadcasted video and still images on social media, no longer dependent on corporate media. Unlike the long, grinding strikes of the 20^th century, flash strikes could be and were repeated again and again. Every few months there were more.

In May 2014, fast food workers walked off the job in 190 U.S. cities, and in 33 other countries, on six continents. In November 2014, Walmart workers held the first retail sit-down strikes since the 1930s, carrying photographs of Depression-era Woolworth sit-down strikers. In April 2015 and again in December, low-wage workers in fast food, home health care, airports and chain retail stores struck in 500 American cities; hotel housekeepers staged actions from Providence, Rhode Island to Long Beach, California and from Karachi, Pakistan to Abuja, Nigeria. All of these groups of workers are continuing to organize and—as a result—public opinion about raising wages has become ever-more positive.

Low-wage strikes have highlighted the fact that the prime welfare cheat, it turns out, is not Ronald Reagan’s fictitious Cadillac-driving, African-American single mother, but the world’s wealthiest corporations. Unwilling to pay their workers a living wage, they use federal poverty programs to subsidize their labor costs. The majority of low-wage workers, and the majority of living wage protesters, are in fact single mothers of color, and the next largest group are men of color. Who is cheating whom, the protesters ask? The answer is clear.

Since 2012, the campaign for a $15 living wage has had more success than anyone imagined it would. Los Angeles City and County, Seattle, San Francisco and many other cities and states have passed increases to the minimum wage and adopted the idea of a living wage. In the 2016 presidential campaign, we are once again discussing the ideas of universal health care as a right in the United States, federally-subsidized day care, free public universities, and progressive tax reform. And millions of protesters are taking us back in time to rehash debates that raged in the eras of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson.

Welcome to the new War on Poverty.

It’s by paying them fairly for their labor.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would lift wages for more than 35 million workers nationwide and generate about $17 billion annually in savings to government assistance programs.

This report shouldn’t come as a surprise. In contrast to the stereotypes and lies about people with low incomes, the reality is that a majority of public assistance recipients either have a job or have an immediate family member who is working. In fact, 41.2 million working Americans—or 30 percent of the workforce—receive means-tested public assistance. Nearly half of them work full-time.

Not surprisingly, workers who receive public assistance are concentrated in jobs that pay low hourly wages, like the retail, food services, and leisure and hospitality industries. A majority (53 percent) of workers earning $12.16 per hour or less—or the bottom 30 percent of wage earners—rely on public assistance. As wages go down, the percentage of workers relying on public assistance gets higher: 60 percent of workers earning less than $7.42—only slightly higher than the $7.25 federal minimum wage—receive some form of means-tested public assistance. Overall, 70 percent of the benefits in programs meant to aid non-elderly low-income households—programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credits—go to working families.

The fact is that the people we expect to work are working (if they can find employment), but they are not being paid enough to make ends meet. While big corporations are achieving extraordinary profits and executive compensation continues to rise, often these same corporations and CEOs are paying such low wages that workers must rely on public assistance.

That means taxpayers are effectively subsidizing wealthy companies to cover the gap between what workers earn on the job and what they need to support themselves and their families. If we want low-income families to have a decent life and the opportunity to thrive, we need strong government assistance programs, but we also need to take a close look at what workers are being paid and how we expect businesses to treat them.

There are many things we can do to stop subsidizing wealthy corporations for paying lousy wages. One obvious solution is to raise the minimum wage. Congress hasn’t lifted it since 2009—today it’s worth 24 percent less than in 1968, adjusted for inflation. The average minimum wage worker is more educated and more productive than in 1968, but she is paid less for her labor.

Even raising the wages of the bottom 30 percent of workers by just $1 per hour would result in $5.2 billion in public assistance savings each year. And the $17 billion in annual savings realized by raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 could be used to strengthen anti-poverty programs—such as expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to childless adults, or improving access to childcare and preschool for children from low- and moderate-income families, or make long-overdue investments in infrastructure.

A fundamental part of the American dream is that if you work hard, you should be able to get ahead. When we let the minimum wage and other labor standards erode to the point where hard work is no longer enough to provide families a decent life, we don’t live up to the promise of that dream.

Subsidizing those who are responsible for non-livable wages only adds insult to injury.

It is a remarkable resetting of labor markets in places like Los Angeles where more than 40 percent of workers will get a wage increase.  These significant gains promise to jumpstart the fight against poverty and to restructure our entire economy.

As one billionaire has argued, to prosper businesses need customers with money in their pockets.  Yet with so many workers paid miserly wages, too many customers have nearly empty pockets.  So while many say we need to tackle extreme inequality with so-called middle-out economic policies, the broad impact of the $15 movement suggests that we can drive the economy forward from the back of the wage structure.

The national conversation now needs to turn to how we can lock in any wage gains.  We will not sustain them if we index the new wage standard to inflation.  Just as we have reinvented the idea of the minimum wage, we need to rethink the wage index as well.  The Leap Forward Project proposes indexing it to personal income per capita.

Year by year over the next generation, if a $15 wage is adjusted to the conventional inflation measure it will fall further and further behind our economy: based on historical trends, it will fall 40 percent behind productivity gains by 2040, and then 96 percent behind by 2060.  A $15 wage indexed to inflation will therefore worsen extreme inequality and workers will once again not have enough money in their pockets to drive our economy forward.

On the other hand, if wages are indexed to economy-wide productivity it is possible they will advance too quickly for some businesses to keep up.  As legend has it, the $15 per hour level was chosen as a target because it represents the halfway mark between a wage that had kept pace with inflation and one that had kept pace with productivity.

What index makes sense today for union contracts and government mandated wage standards?  The Leap Forward Project analyzed several possible economic indexes, looking at data for the United States and California from the onset of extreme inequality (1979) to the current period (2013).

For each, we calculated what the 1979 minimum wage of $2.90 would be today had we used the given index.  The results might be surprising.

Consider the first three possible indexes:

• A $2.90 minimum wage indexed to the return on wealth, (nationwide): This huge increase to $35.10 reflects the shift of our economy from rewarding the work of the many to rewarding the wealth of the few.
• A $2.90 minimum wage indexed to the median wage (California): This relatively modest increase to $9.34 reflects the problem of the stagnant middle-class.
• A $2.90 minimum wage indexed to the 95^th percentile wage, (nationwide): This significant increase to $13.08 reflects greater increases garnered by skilled workers.

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What does this analysis tell us?  Indexing to the median wages as proposed by Congressman Scott and Senator Murray is little better than indexing to inflation if wages continue to stagnate.  The embattled middle-class for now does not have the muscle to drive our economy.

Indexing to the 95^th percentile wage, while providing significant increases, is based on the wrong story of how to restructure our economy.  It is not about a janitor’s wages keeping up with doctor’s pay—some might dismiss that as “the bitter politics of envy”.  It is about how to drive prosperity for both janitors and doctors.

In fact, the story of the “back of the wage pack” is not that different from the very front of the pack.  Wage gains denied to most of us appear to have become assets for the richest of the rich.  From an economic perspective, we need an index that in part reflects not only gains in wages and incomes but gains in the value of assets as well.

We need an index that will move ahead faster than inflation, but not necessarily as fast as the overall economy.  The fourth index—personal income per capita—fits the bill.  It includes income from wages and salaries along with dividends and rental income; it does not include capital gains.  And if the 1979 minimum wage had been indexed in this manner, it would have reached—wait for it—$15 this past New Year’s Day.

The Fight for $15 has achieved considerable momentum. For that momentum to create lasting change we need to lock in these hard fought gains. Each year our new $15 standard needs to increase so that workers have enough in their pockets to help drive our economy forward. And in the years to come, we need more policy innovations like $15 so that we can fully tackle extreme inequality and achieve enduring prosperity for all of us.

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Javier’s experience isn’t uncommon. Our civil legal aid attorneys have also represented a crew of cleaners who were locked in a restaurant overnight while they cleaned (and not paid overtime for the additional hours) and construction workers strung along for years with partial weekly payments, among others. We have even had to sue the same employers multiple times on behalf of different workers. And the practice is widespread. A report from Temple University’s Sheller Center found that in any given work week in the Philadelphia area, almost 130,000 workers will be paid less than minimum wage, over 100,000 will experience an overtime violation, and over 80,000 will be forced to work off-the-clock without pay.

Although wage theft is illegal under federal law and under statutes in most states, enforcement is underfunded—sometimes nonexistent. This disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, who are more likely to work in low-regulation and non-union jobs where employers cut corners at their expense. But these workers—who need those wages the most—don’t know where to turn for help when they do not receive a paycheck, fear losing their job if they complain, or simply cannot afford to miss work for the several days that it takes to file a complaint and attend a court hearing. And for immigrant workers like Javier, they are often threatened based on their immigration status when they complain to their boss.

And between the small number of workers willing to complain and low financial penalties, deterrents to wage theft are inadequate to curb the practice. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Wage Payment and Collection Law only mandates a penalty of 25 percent of wages due on top of repaying the wages. Thus, if an employer doesn’t pay six workers and only four come forward with formal complaints in court, the employer comes out ahead—he pays less in fines than he would have had he paid his six workers correctly.

Unfortunately, bills that would help address these issues have languished in the legislature for more than a year despite the support of the vast majority of voters. In the absence of legislative action, we have found that local ordinances are a powerful locus of action, even though they impact fewer workers.

As the workshops of democracy, cities and municipalities also allow us to test new models on a limited scale and to identify what should be replicated on a wider scale. This was a tried and true strategy in the context of paid sick days: after an organized and effective campaign over the last few years, activists managed to pass a paid sick leave ordinance in Philadelphia last year. Similar ordinances have come out of San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles, among other cities.

We therefore partnered with labor and community activists to pass a local anti-wage theft ordinance that fit well within the powers of a municipal government. The legislation included three main facets, each of which was integral to the legislation.

First, an administrative enforcement mechanism allows workers to bring complaints against their employers without having to miss work and therefore pay. Making the complaint process easy and the hearing free  is a critical way to expand remedies by making them practically available to more people. Although the federal Department of Labor already offers this kind of service, it does not do so for workers who work at businesses that have less than $500,000 in annual revenue. Some states offer a similar complaint process, but their efficacy varies.

Second, the legislation requires that penalties be raised. The current penalties in Pennsylvania are shamefully low, making wage theft an economically good decision for the unscrupulous employer. By raising penalties, the ordinance should increase compliance by making wage theft a bad economic decision.

Third, the legislation allows the city to go after business licenses, further demonstrating to employers that wage theft is a poor business decision. By allowing the city to revoke or suspend a business license, we can root out the worst actors and prevent them from causing further harm (or cajole them into compliance).

With these principles in mind, we partnered with Councilman Bill Greenlee, who had led and won the seven year fight for paid sick leave, and introduced a strong bill in City Council. Boosted by press coverage of the widespread local wage theft problem, we built a broader network of community leaders and advocates, created supporting materials, wrote legal memos, met with editorial boards, and lined up workers to tell their stories. The bill passed City Council in October and was signed by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter in December. The ordinance will go into effect in July 2016 and will be implemented by our new Mayor, Jim Kenney.

Despite all appearances, legislative change that benefits working families is possible, even when state politics makes it seem impossible. In order to achieve pro-working family change, activists need to alter their frame by working at the local level, rather than deal with the gridlock and lack of action at the federal level and state levels.

After all, as former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.”

*Name has been changed.

I felt it was important to be there. I wanted to ask candidates how they would reform a criminal justice system that is ripping apart our most vulnerable communities, especially communities of color. What would they do to redirect public funding to support—not strangle—opportunity for people of color? How would they reverse the barriers faced by the 650,000 people released from prison every year?

The issue of how to invest in our struggling communities is one that all candidates—regardless of party—need to address. Yet, for all the debates, forums, stump speeches and glad-handing, not enough of them are talking about it.

I know firsthand how a lack of hope and opportunity desiccate once-thriving families and communities.

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I grew up on the South Side of Chicago during a time when parents, including my mother and father, could find work on the docks or in the factories that dotted the skyline. Our neighborhood was vibrant and solidly working-class. We had a good life. Then, one by one, the factories closed. My parents and the parents of my friends were all laid off.

There were so few people working it seemed like every day was a federal holiday. With every passing year, during the 1970s and 80s, I saw the lights dim in my community. In a short time, we became defined by unemployment and poverty, and then drugs—first heroin, and then crack cocaine. As a young man, I saw the hustlers, pimps, and drug dealers flashing their money, nice cars, and trendy clothes. Their lifestyle represented the only glitter I saw in the neighborhood. So, at an early age, I became a hustler too. I used drugs and committed identity theft to pay for my habit.

It caught up with me and I served 11 years in state and federal prison. While there, I saw countless 17-, 18-, or 19-year-olds who were sentenced to decades in prison for drug crimes. And once you are in the system, it is designed in a way that keeps you in. It is a vicious cycle where the odds are stacked against you, every door is closed, and any small mistake sends you right back.

It starts with the exorbitant fees and rates that incarcerated people have to pay for things like talking on the phone to stay in touch with family. It continues when people get out—often they cannot even go back home to their families because of “one strike and you’re out” policies that prevent people with criminal records from living in public or subsidized housing. Too many young men end up couch surfing just to keep a roof over their heads at night.

And then there is the job search. When I was released in the mid-1990s, the only work I could get was as a dishwasher. Eventually, I found a second job as a telemarketer. Both jobs paid minimum wage. It is nearly impossible for people coming from prison to get re-established if they can’t get a decent job at a decent wage. You can’t pay all those fines and restitution earning poverty wages.

I now live in Dane County, Wisconsin—home to Madison—where I work as an advocate for the formerly incarcerated. I see the prison system as a form of genocide as I watch hope drain from people who are permanently tagged as “felons.” It’s no wonder they don’t feel they are part of America.

We need to re-invest funds—not toward more police weapons and militarized gear that are used to threaten our communities—but toward programs that create opportunity for people and their relatives who have been scarred with convictions. We need to remove barriers that keep formerly-incarcerated people from working or living with their families. We need to identify the types of jobs available to incarcerated people and prepare them for those jobs.

I was a smart kid growing up. I learned that my people had little chance at a legitimate good life. But I hope all the presidential candidates recognize that we need an America where our young people hope for bright futures, rather than think that the best they can do in this world is not be killed.

In some of the worst performing states, more than one in five residents live in poverty.

Adding insult to injury, many of these poorly performing states have doubled down on conservative policies that have made life harder for low-income people:

• Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee have allowed wages to stagnate by not setting their minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25. For example, in Georgia, employees that are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act can be paid as little as $5.15 per hour. This failure to raise wages has meant that a single parent of two children who works full time does not earn enough to escape poverty.

• Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Tennessee, and West Virginia maintain restrictive asset tests, which decrease low-income families’ self-sufficiency by requiring them to spend down their savings or sell off assets to access assistance. Assets are important for economic mobility generally—for example, when working-age families can put aside even sums of less than $2,000—they are less likely to face hardships such as running short on food, forgoing needed health care, or having the utilities turned off. But, in states like Georgia with particularly stringent tests, families can only have $1,000 in assets to access cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, with few exceptions.

• Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas (under the leadership of newly-elected Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson), Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi have instituted drug testing that stigmatizes public assistance applicants even though they test positive for drug use at a rate lower than the general population. In Tennessee, officials found that less than 0.2% of all applicants tested positive, mirroring results in other states like Mississippi and Arizona. The cost to states for this wasteful testing has exceeded $1 million dollars collectively—money that could have been spent on strengthening the program.

Minnesota, ranked as the largest slaughterer of turkeys in the nation, has long been an epicenter of the American meatpacking industry. The state is home to 33 major meatpacking plants, and, with just over 12,000 workers in the sector, boasts the highest concentration of jobs in the industry nationwide. But over the past few decades, as plants began to crop up in rural areas and small cities far removed from the influence of urban unions, these jobs have grown less secure. Today, a mere nine plants in the state are organized.

It is clear that the rest stand to benefit from collective bargaining. The industry ranks as one of the most dangerous in the country, recording almost 39,800 nonfatal injuries nationwide—or 7.5 cases per every 100 full-time workers in 2008. Workers can also be exposed to toxic levels of pathogens and chemicals, like ammonia.

Minnesota factories are no exception to these safety hazards. At a plant operated by turkey giant Jennie-O in Melrose—a small city 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis—injuries are not uncommon. In 2006, for example, an employee was crushed to death while cleaning out a machine. Other workers report being harmed by excessive speeds on production lines, says Ahmed Ali, who advocates for employees at the Melrose plant as a Lead Staff Organizer at the Greater Minnesota Worker Center. According to Ali, lines often run at speeds that are double the industry averages, which can lead to repetitive motion injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome. Through a spokesperson, Hormel—Jennie-O’s parent company—says that line speeds at the Melrose plant comply with government standards.

But Omer Hassan, a former worker at the Melrose plant, claims that excessive line speeds led him to develop a musculoskeletal injury that rendered his right hand inoperative. According to Hassan, he still suffers “severe pain” on his right side. Following the injury, he took time off to see a doctor and says he was denied pay for missing work. He was subsequently fired in August 2015, which has jeopardized his ability to provide for himself and his mother. As he told TalkPoverty, “It has been difficult for me and for my mom. I have always had a job and brought home a paycheck. That’s all gone for now.” Hormel did not comment on this specific case, but said that in the event of an injury, employees are given “suitable alternative duties” while they recuperate.

These poor labor conditions extend beyond Melrose. Barbara, whose name has been changed to protect anonymity, is an employee of the Gold’N Plump chicken plant in St. Cloud. She says the production line there is like a “flowing, raging river.” Workers who cannot keep up are asked to sign a warning letter or are even terminated on the spot. According to Barbara, those who request to use the restroom more than three times a month are also asked to sign a warning letter—a practice that would run contrary to state law, which requires an option for a bathroom break every four consecutive hours of work. Through a spokesperson, Gold’N Plump said that the company provides regularly scheduled breaks for workers and recognizes that “each person is unique, which may mean accommodating additional restroom breaks” for some. However, the company did not deny that it issues warning letters for additional bathroom use.

On top of these alleged abuses in the industry, wages are low. According to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, in Kandiyohi, Meeker, Renville, and McLeod counties, annual median wages for slaughterers and meatpackers amount to $27,909, which is just above the federal poverty line for a family of four. By contrast, Hormel CEO Jeffrey Ettinger reportedly took home more than $13 million in total compensation in 2014.

Given these conditions, the need for stronger protections for workers is clear. In Watonwan County, workers at the Butterfield Foods chicken slaughter plant are represented by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1161. According to Darin Rehnelt, a representative for the union, UCFW Local 1161 has successfully negotiated grievance procedures to protect workers against unlawful termination, as well as nine paid holidays a year, time-and-a-half after eight hours, and double-time on Sundays. Rehnelt says that collective bargaining has also allowed workers to set up internal structures to increase safety. Union stewards monitor line speeds and labor conditions, and workers can share concerns with a health and safety committee. If laborers are injured, they have recourse to a union-provided attorney who specializes in workers’ compensation law.

The striking contrast between the plants demonstrates some of the immediate benefits of unionization, such as increased wages and benefits. But on a broader level, unions are also key to ensuring economic and social mobility. According to the Center for American Progress, low-income children are more upwardly mobile in areas with higher rates of union membership. And unions also play a central role in combating income inequality; lower rates of unionization are associated with an increased share of income going to the wealthiest Americans.

Our poultry need not be consumed at the cost of workers’ dignity. By building a strong labor movement at the company, state, and federal level, progressives can change a status quo predicated on giving workers a raw deal.

This Labor Day, nearly a quarter of Americans who work in the private sector couldn’t spend time with their families because they don’t have access to paid holiday time. This is just one symptom of an economic system that is out of whack—so much so that people working full-time, or two or even three jobs, can’t make ends meet. While well-connected, handsomely paid CEOs have the flexibility they need to spend time with their families and provide their children with resources well beyond the basics—too many of us are barely getting by (if that) and living to work, rather than working to live full lives.

For nearly 40 years, Americans have been working harder and more productively but aren’t seeing any change in how much they take home at the end of the week. A study from the Economic Policy Institute released this week found that many parents’ paychecks aren’t enough to cover their family’s most basic needs, and that working full-time at the federal minimum wage isn’t enough for a parent with one child to get by anywhere in the country.

Even as the economy has turned around, most Americans have failed to see improvements in their pay, according to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project. This is especially true for those who work in the retail, food service, and home-care industries, which already are among the lowest paying sectors and have seen the greatest declines in take-home pay. All the while, more and more corporations are leaving the people who cook our food and stock our shelves without the right to stand together to demand better wages and working conditions. And, profitable corporations like McDonald’s and Walmart are keeping their employees from working enough hours to pay the bills and making their lives impossible to plan.

Despite our unbalanced economy and the reality of poverty – as well as all of the forces working against the stability families so desperately need – the past few months have demonstrated the enormous potential for change that has arrived.

Take the minimum wage wins in Los Angeles, Seattle, Kansas City, St. Louis and Birmingham; and the wage increases for home-care providers in Massachusetts and fast-food employees in New York. Or look at cities like San Francisco that have enacted measures to ensure that massive retailers provide more hours to the clerks and cooks who work for them so that they can better pay the bills. President Obama has moved to make sure nearly 5 million men and women will soon have access to stronger overtime pay, and federal contractors will have to provide paid sick leave. And recent legal decisions have made it possible for two million home-care providers to receive a minimum wage and overtime pay after relentless organizing by the women who care for our families and want to better care for their own families, too. Finally, the National Labor Relations Board has just ruled that contractors and franchise employees can organize and hold their employers accountable for unfair treatment.

The forces that keep working people living on the brink are beginning to fall apart, and it’s not a mystery as to why: People have been standing together and pressing for change. Still, there is so much work that remains. Coming off of Labor Day, let’s celebrate the progress we’ve made together – and dig in with resolve and determination for the fight ahead.

But because she’s a salaried employee, she’s ineligible to earn overtime pay. The long hours, weeks spent on the road and living out of hotels has taken a toll on her emotionally and physically.

“I’m just so beat down,” McCrary, 50, said from a job site in South Florida.  “I’m 100 pounds heavier than I was when I started the job.”

So when she heard last week’s news that President Obama wants to expand the overtime rules so that more Americans are eligible, she was excited.

“Right now, too many Americans are working long days for less pay than they deserve,” Obama wrote in an op-ed for The Huffington Post. “That’s partly because we’ve failed to update overtime regulations for years.”

The overtime threshold was last raised in 1975. According to the Department of Labor, 62 percent of workers qualified for overtime back then. Now, just 8 percent do.  In fact, a family of four would have to live in poverty before a breadwinner would qualify for overtime—the poverty threshold for a family of four is $24,008, but the overtime threshold is just $23,660.

“The rules that establish which workers are exempt from overtime pay haven’t kept up with the cost of living,” reads a Department of Labor webpage.  Under the new proposal, the federal government would lift the overtime threshold from $23,660 to $50,440.

With a salary of just over $40,000, McCrary is one of the 5 million working Americans who would benefit from the new rule.  She stands to earn up to $15,000 more annually, and doesn’t hesitate when asked what she’d do with the extra income: “I would put that money in savings for old age. I have to start to put something away to fall back on, because I don’t want to have to fall back on my kids,” she said.

McCrary’s current job offers stock options and a 401K retirement plan and she’s taken advantage of those benefits for the past two years.

But before this job, she had only one employer that offered a retirement plan and it cashed out the employee retirement accounts when the business folded.

She knows what it’s like to juggle to make ends meet. A single mother of five who are all adults now, she’s worked as many as three jobs—driving a limo, working at a hotel, and doing census surveys.

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Like many parents, McCrary put her children’s future ahead of her own. That included helping them pay for college. But it sapped her efforts to save for herself.

“My daughter took out student loans that we didn’t realize were parent loans,” she said. “I’m on default on those and they grow every year.”

A $25,000 loan has ballooned into a debt of more than $40,000, she said.

“Trying to keep my kids in school and get them educated was more important than trying to put something away for myself,” McCrary said.  “I figured the worst case scenario, I could live in one of their basements.”

Nationwide, a movement has swelled that is calling attention to the struggles of fast-food and retail employees, car washers, home care professionals and others who make a minimum wage.

The Obama Administration’s proposed rule targets a specific set of employees – white-collar employees, managers and supervisors who are often full-time and salaried. Currently, if these workers put in more than 40 hours a week, it does not translate into more money in their paychecks.

“Many working families are putting in longer hours, but are not seeing their extra work reflected in their wages because they are currently not eligible to receive overtime,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change.  “Being able to receive overtime will greatly level the wage playing field that is greatly tipped in favor of the wealthy in our country.”

The proposal could take months to implement. It is subject to a 60-day public comment period. The administration can put the rule into effect through regulation. However, the conservative-led Congress can try to fight it with legislation.

Adjusting public policy to keep up with the times is long overdue, said McCrary, who has noticed that some supervisors seem reluctant to ask to be paid for all of the hours that they work.

“Some of the people have been out here for so long, they don’t even argue about it. This is the way it’s always been,” she said.  “It is time for a change.”

Being a low-income American comes from being paid a low income.

It seems like a basic point, but it’s one Andy Puzder needs to review. Puzder is CEO of CKE Restaurants, Inc., which employs more than 20,000 people and worldwide owns, operates and franchises more than 3,300 fast food restaurants, including Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

In a recent op-ed, Puzder made the specious claim that the social safety net “can lock [people] into poverty.”

He argues that “these programs have the unintended consequence of discouraging work rather than encouraging independence, self-reliance and pride,” and that, because of government assistance, his low-wage employees across the U.S. are refusing promotions and additional hours “for fear of losing public assistance.”

What Puzder forgets to point out is that it is poverty wages—poverty wages paid by institutions like Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. to many of their 20,000-plus employees—that force families to turn to nutrition and housing assistance, and other government-supplemented work supports, just to get by.

Media Matters reports that a 2013 study by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) found that “the overwhelming majority of fast food employees (89.1 percent) make less than $9 per hour and face significant ‘barriers to upward mobility’ in the profession.”

In a recent interview with Fox News, Puzder doubled down on his flawed thesis.

Video provided  by Media Matters for America

“We need a different system,” he concluded.

On that point he’s right.

We need a system where people like Savino, a father of two in Brooklyn and a member of the New York Communities for Change, don’t have to work 72 hours a week at a local supermarket for wages that are so low they still struggle to get by.

“Sometimes things are so bad that I have to decide–should I pay rent this month, or should I eat?” said Savino.

We need a system where mothers like Ashely, a Washington, D.C. resident and a member of Working Families, don’t have to sleep with a young child on the floor because jobs don’t pay enough to cover rent.

“If I were paid a living wage, I could get my own place,” Ashley said. “As it is, I feel stuck, and don’t see a way out.”

We need employers to pay enough money so that people like Darrell, who works in the auto parts industry in Ohio, can bring home more than $272 a week. Darrell hopes to move out of the two-bedroom trailer he shares with his daughter, son-in-law and 17-month-old granddaughter.

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“I just want enough to survive,” Darrell said, “and I think that is a reasonable expectation for someone who goes to work and works hard every day.”

We need a system where parents aren’t forced to choose between working more hours for low wages and paying exorbitant child care fees, or staying home with their kids and barely scraping by on government assistance.

We need a system where people are paid enough during their working years to put money away in order to retire peacefully in old age.

We need to change the current system, where people like Puzder make more in one day ($17,192) than one of his minimum wage employees would earn after working full-time for an entire year ($15,130).

This system was created by people like Puzder and political leaders who, like him, blame the very people who are just trying to make ends meet. But we have the power to change how the system works.

Not surprisingly, the road to change doesn’t involve taking away supports from the people who need them most. It involves creating good jobs for the people who need them most; jobs that provide a fair wage and benefits—that give people options rather than forcing them to choose between bad and worse.

I continued to work throughout my struggles. Like many others in the new economy, I went from owning my own business to a low-wage, part-time job in the fast food industry. And, even though I found work at McDonald’s, my wages were not enough to rent an apartment of my own, pay medical bills, or buy a car. Fast forward five years and I still experience unpredictable hours, and I am rarely scheduled for even 25 hours a week.

In light of my financial situation, I have cut back on living costs as much as possible. I rent a shared room in a house where I also share a bathroom and kitchen with 7 other people. Although taking the train to work would be much faster, I save money by commuting on the bus. In the evenings, it can take as much as 2 hours to get home. I’ve proactively applied for food stamps, but due to my work schedule and commute time, it has been impossible for me to attend the required in-person meetings.

In America, we’re told that if we work hard, we can make it. If we cut back and save and scrimp, we will succeed. I have done these things and I’m still struggling. And so, I’m looking for answers. I ask the people making the policies in Washington, D.C. and California – how did our economy become so broken? What else would have you me do to survive?

Things have improved for me somewhat — my city passed a $12.25 per hour minimum wage, and the raise, which just went into effect, helps me keep up with my bills. Maybe I will be able to save up enough to buy a car so that I can start up my window washing business again. But, with this raise, I have to choose between saving for my business and covering basic living costs such as dental care. I am one disaster away from losing everything.

For example, last month, I went to the emergency room with severe tooth pain. The doctor pulled 7 teeth in one sitting. Now I need dentures that I can’t afford to pay for. My friends and family back home in Florida are going to pass the hat to help me out. But that’s not the way it should be. This isn’t how we fix our broken economy and provide opportunity to people.

We need to fight for $15 an hour. I can speak for myself when I say that, if I made $15 per hour, things would totally change. I could buy a car, afford regular dental care, and maybe even be married and have a house. I could save to reestablish my business and get back on my feet. When Americans work hard, we deserve to be paid enough to support ourselves and our families. That’s why I continue to fight.

Mrs. Parks was trained in civil disobedience; her action was calculated and planned in coordination with local leaders. She was one of hundreds of community members who had come together at a specific moment in history when African Americans across the country, after decades of living under oppressive Jim Crow laws, had reached a tipping point and were thirsty for change.

Today, we find ourselves at another tipping point.

With more than one in three Americans living beneath 200 percent of the poverty line, and more than 17 million people who want full-time employment unable to find it, families across the country are falling into economic crisis.

At the same time, income inequality has steadily increased over the last three decades. Since 1979, wages for the top 1 percent have increased an astounding 138 percent, while wages for the bottom 90 percent have increased just 15 percent over the same period.

These statistics are even grimmer for women and people of color. While unemployment among whites has dropped to just 4.4 percent, the rate for African Americans living in metropolitan areas is an astounding 11.3 percent. Likewise, women are still making just 78 percent of what men make. For black and Hispanic women, these numbers drop to 64 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

And just as occurred in Montgomery, when civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and E.D. Nixon were ready and willing to organize an eager public to participate in the 381-day bus boycott, we too are now surrounded by palpable energy for change.

Just two weeks ago, the Fight for $15 movement held a national day of action—reported to be the largest mobilization of people with low-incomes in history—that furthered the national public debate about low wages and job quality.

Other social movements are making connections to income inequality and jobs as well. In an effort to end employment barriers for people who were formerly incarcerated, criminal justice reform advocates are working to “ban the box” that asks about conviction history on initial employment application forms.

Likewise, the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the immigrant rights movement have begun to link their fights with the fights of low-wage workers, connecting the dots between human and civil rights, and improving the lives and working conditions of people in low-wage jobs.

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With so many families struggling to get by and so much energy for change, the Center for Community Change (CCC) has joined forces with a coalition of national, state and local organizations in 41 states dedicated to building a new economy from the ground up that actually puts American families first.

This morning, CCC, Working Families Organization, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Center for Popular Democracy, and Jobs With Justice are unveiling a bold new agenda called Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All. This initiative takes the major crises of our time and turns them into opportunities for change. The following are the five focus areas of the campaign:

• Decades of stagnant wages, the erosion of labor-market standards, and attacks on unions have left millions of working people without enough to get by. By raising employer standards, setting higher wage floors and restoring workers’ bargaining power, we can ensure that all working Americans have enough to provide for their families.

• As mothers and fathers struggle to find quality, affordable childcare, and families are forced to make difficult decisions every day about taking care of elderly or disabled family members, a major investment in the care economy would not only create and improve jobs in childcare and in-home care, but would also support families in need of quality care for loved ones.

• Historic disinvestment in communities of color has created concentrated areas of high poverty. By reinvesting in these communities, we can level the playing field and give millions of Americans the opportunity to advance and unleash their talents for the benefit of everyone.

• Global climate change may very well be the single greatest challenge facing humanity in this century, but it is also an opportunity to create sustainable jobs that reduce carbon emissions.

• Lastly, as millions of Americans struggle to provide for their families, the top 1 percent own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth and they continue to be showered with tax cuts. It’s time we fix this system and invest revenue in an economy that works for all of us.

Less than a week before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. about the Poor People’s Campaign – an initiative that sought to unite Americans, rich and poor, into a movement to end poverty.

King told the crowd, “This is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

Today, our country is more aware than ever before that our entire economic system is out of balance. We have reached a time in history where the need, the opportunity, and the energy are all here to create an economy that works for our families—now we need the will and the dedication of the American public to make it happen.

To learn more about Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All, and to join our campaign, visit PutFamiliesFirst.org.

Unfortunately, the American Dream is just that—a dream. When I returned to the States, I quickly realized that in many cases restaurant workers—who often earn the minimum wage or the tipped minimum wage—are expendable in the eyes of employers. After working for about a month in a restaurant in my hometown, I began noticing improper behavior from my employer. They failed to pay me on time and accused me of stealing without presenting any evidence to back up their accusations. When I didn’t receive my paychecks on time, I had to rely on customers’ tips.

Even so, I would come to work early and leave late – not for the money but to gain experience and knowledge. I tolerated petty arguments and misdirected anger. I had a clear vision and burning motivation for a career in the restaurant industry, but I was unhappy with my work. I felt disposable and without a voice. However, since I needed to pay rent and had responsibilities, I knew that quitting would be financially unwise.

I was lucky to learn about the D.C. Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), a worker center dedicated to improving working conditions and raising industry standards for all Washington, D.C. restaurant workers. Here I was, a young, broke, female, black, twenty-something-year-old from nowhere that mattered. But to organizations like ROC-D.C., I do matter. When I quit my job, and my employer withheld my final paycheck in retaliation, ROC-D.C. advised me about my options. They reassured me that I am the embodiment of the American dream and that I have a life that should not be measured by the size of my bank account.

ROC-D.C assisted me but I was left wondering – how can everyone become educated about their rights in the workplace? I am not alone in these experiences. Through ROC-D.C., restaurant workers come to realize that although we might be dealing with problems on a daily basis, we are also part of the solution. We have to fight for a living wage, against wage theft, and for protection so that we can stand up without fear of employer retaliation.

Restaurant workers are adults, mothers, realists and dreamers. We are living off tips, and working more than one job to make ends meet. In the words of Chuck Palahniuk (the author of Fight Club), “We’re [low-wage workers] everyone you depend on. We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers.” With our laundromat-washed uniforms, nicked fingertips, and loose dollar bills, we are paid as low as $2.13 an hour.

It is time to take a stand. The minimum wages in D.C. and across the country has been infuriatingly inadequate for way too long. In Washington, D.C., servers take home a median wage of just $9.23 an hour including tips. We often rely on food stamps and have a poverty rate that is twice as high as the poverty rate of the general workforce. This unacceptable reality spurred workers and advocates to launch a successful campaign to raise wages. Former D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray signed a “living wage” bill, which increased the minimum wage to $11.50 and indexed it to inflation.

Unfortunately, tipped workers will still receive an extremely low base salary of $2.77 an hour, meaning we have to continue to live off tips and the mercy of the customer.

If you are a restaurant worker in the Washington D.C. Metro area, I encourage you to get involved with ROC-D.C. We are currently running a ONE FAIR WAGE campaign to raise the minimum raise for all workers, including tipped workers. If you’re unhappy with your job, or think you’re being treat unfairly, then I encourage you to join a worker center. Get involved in a local movement that pushes for respect, fair wages, and benefits for all workers.

Letrice, 34, is an adjunct professor who is just a few weeks away from receiving her Ph.D. in history from the University of Memphis. She is paid $1500 to teach one class. Given the number of hours she puts in each week—teaching, lesson-planning, grading papers, and counseling students—she estimates that she makes approximately $5.36 an hour, well below the federal minimum wage. Letrice doesn’t get health insurance through her job and she has never received a raise.

“I get food stamps. I have $270,000 in student loan debt,” she said, explaining that her student debt is high because she was diagnosed with breast cancer while she was a student. Rather than dropping out and being forced to make payments without an income, Letrice took out more student loans to stay in school and continue teaching while undergoing chemotherapy.

Letrice was among the thousands of people in 236 cities across the country that hit the streets to demand higher wages and better workplace treatment as part of the Fight for $15 national day of action. The movement has broadened—workers and their supporters are no longer fighting solely to increase the minimum wage. Lettice, for example, is paid per class not per hour—so an increased minimum wage wouldn’t affect her at all.   But she needs better pay and benefits like health insurance.

For Miguel Portillo, a car wash worker in Queens, New York, he joined the movement to fight back against workplace discrimination and wage theft.  Miguel is a part of the Car Wash Workers Campaign, an effort led by Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change.  Organizing and joining a union has helped Miguel and his coworkers bargain for better wages and better working conditions.

“We’ve won a lot of things financial-wise, but the most important thing we’ve won is respect,” he said.

Still, with his hourly wage of $8.75 and his wife’s minimum wage job at a grocery store, they struggle to support their family.

Across the country in San Francisco, nearly 100 people flooded into a McDonalds at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, chanting, “Strike, strike! Organizing is our right!” Inside, people offered testimony about their struggles with low wages and unpredictable hours.

Click on the images in the slideshow to see more information about each photo. 

Isaiah Mitchelle of San Leandro, California works at Jack-In-the-Box for $9 an hour and is a member of a worker-led group called Up the Pay East Bay.

“It’s a backbreaker,” he said, describing his daily regimen of cooking, cleaning and cashiering.

Isaiah said life would improve drastically for him and his little sisters if he were to receive $15 an hour. “I could afford to save up for a car and help pay for my tuition at Chabot College, where I’m taking my general education [classes] right now.”

Maya Shankar, an undergraduate student at North Carolina State University, said that she joined the Fight for $15 when she started to think about her future.

“Once we get out of college, it’s going to be really, really hard to pay back the loans we took if we don’t have a good, stable job that we can pay it off with,” Maya said. She noted that a $15 hourly wage would nearly double her current pay at the campus library.

Maya was one of many students and faculty who came out Wednesday evening in the pouring rain to rally on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“I deserve $15 an hour,” said Sha-Love Lawrence, and in-home care provider in Atlanta. “And I need it to take care of my daughter and to make sure that she can live her dreams of becoming a doctor.”

Sha-Love was among a large crowd of protesters who converged on the campus of Clark Atlanta University on Wednesday. Many of the protesters were in-home care providers, holding signs such as, “I take care of your loved ones,” and “Home care workers: We take care of Atlanta.”

Sha-Love explained simply, “We can’t live. We can’t survive on $7.25. That’s exactly what I make. That’s not livable wages.”

Providing in-home care is physically demanding and time consuming, Sha-Love said. She often works until 10 p.m., and if the next person doesn’t show up to take over her shift, she has to cover their shift as well.

“$15 is just a start. We’re worth more. I take care of people’s lives. What can I do for them if I can’t take care of me?” she said.

People throughout the U.S. sent a clear message on April 15^th that in addition to better wages, people also need better jobs—jobs that provide employees with regular schedules, paid sick leave, dependable hours, benefits and respect.

Several organizations are now stepping forward to act on that message at a national level. On April 29^th, the Center for Community Change, Working Families Organization, Jobs With Justice, Center for Popular Democracy, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and dozens of local grassroots partners are coming together to launch Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All. It’s a major economic initiative to reinvest in low-income communities of color and bring jobs—good jobs—to everyone.

“I think it is important to fight together,” said Miguel. “If we don’t bring our fights, our campaigns, together, we are not going to accomplish anything. This fight is for everyone.”

At a time when multi-national corporations are 50 of the world’s largest 100 economies, this movement has had to be both intensely local and expansively global. Less than three years ago, the grassroots campaign for a living wage began in scattered Thanksgiving protests by New York City fast food workers and Los Angeles Walmart associates. This year’s protests are the largest and most global labor actions ever mounted.

From Manila to Manhattan, workers are showing the face of the 21^st century labor movement. On Wednesday, Fight for $15 protests gleefully short-circuited the “90-seconds-a-customer” service rule at McDonald’s. In Seoul, workers staged mock trials of Ronald McDonald for wage theft; in Manila they blocked streets and malls with singing and dancing flash mobs. Protesters uploaded clips of their actions onto You-Tube and Facebook. They Instagrammed photographs and sent fast-disappearing Snapchat messages about where to meet for the next action. In this era of social media, organizers no longer need to worry about press coverage—or at least they don’t’ need to worry as much.

In many parts of the world, this April’s worker protests offered local labor activists a chance to highlight their own struggles. In Brazil, unions called a general strike for April 15, in solidarity with workers in other countries and to protest recent legislative encroachments on labor rights.  In Bangladesh, garment workers have, in the last two years, built a global movement forcing scores of major clothing labels to sign an accord allowing Bangladeshi unions to inspect garment factories for safety violations. On April 24, the 2nd anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse—which killed 1,134 garment workers and injured thousands more—Bangladeshi workers will lead a global day of action to pressure brand companies to pay damages to victims and their families. Garment union leader Kalpona Akter and Rana Plaza survivor Mahina Begum were among 28 arrested last month in New Jersey for bringing that demand in person to corporate executives of The Children’s Place. This month, Benetton finally agreed to pay damages.

The living wage issue is also as local as it is global. Fifty-eight percent of the U.S. jobs created since the 2008 crash do not pay enough for workers to live on. Local workers’ protests blocked sidewalks in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where immigrant restaurant employees endure 70-hour weeks and wages that are even lower than the pitiful federal minimum of $2.13 an hour for tipped employees. Home health care workers, too, have begun to step out of the shadows where they care for fragile clients. How they find the time to organize is anyone’s guess, given that some work as many as 120 hours a week. The fight for a living wage has even started to interrupt classes on American college campuses, where three-quarters of professors are now contingent contract laborers and one in four earns so little that they require public assistance to survive.  Adjunct professors are not quite as hard-pressed as the country’s fast food workers, 52% of whom receive public assistance; home-health care workers, 48% of whom need to turn to cash, food or medical aid programs; or child care workers, 46% of whom also need government aid. Still, a majority of college professors are now employed on temporary contracts, shuttling between campuses, teaching upwards of 12 courses a year, earning between $20,000 and $25,000 annually.  They are truly low-wage workers, and they feel a real bond with fast food workers, child-care workers, and providers of at-home health care.

It is extraordinary for workers as different as these to band together. We have reached a point where even an advanced degree no longer guarantees a path out of poverty.

Perhaps that is why the movement has already had its successes.  City officials from Providence to Seattle have passed municipal minimum wages that are significantly higher than federal or state requirements. Voters in red states as well as blue cast their ballots last November for increased state minimum wages. And, most recently, the world’s largest corporations have shown signs of recognition that they must raise wages a little bit — if only for appearances.

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Still, fair wages are not all that this movement seeks. Low-wage workers — in the U.S. and abroad — are demanding the right to unionize without employer retribution. That demand has met fierce opposition from employers of all sizes.

Low-wage workers have few options for exerting power over employers. One is “hitting them in the pocketbook” — staging protests that disrupt business. Another is leveraging the power of government on the side of workers: Large unions such as The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), representing health care workers in Connecticut — and small worker’s groups such as the Laundry Workers Center United (LWCU), representing restaurant employees in New York City — have recently filed suit for wage theft, sexual harassment, and violation of federal minimum wage and maximum hours laws.

Increasingly, employers have filed their own suits — using the Racketeering and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) — to try to hobble union campaigns.  RICO suits filed solely to hinder labor organizing violate the spirit of the original legislation, passed in 1970 to facilitate prosecution of organized crime and to limit mobsters’ ability to take over labor unions. But, from the perspective of workers, such suits only inspire more activism. As Virgilio Aran recently told me about the RICO suit filed against organized employees of Liberato restaurant in the Bronx: “For every suit they file against us we will organize 1000 times harder.”

Just a few short years after it was declared dead and almost buried, the labor movement has come roaring back. Behind it has come a powerful bipartisan sentiment that it is time to pay workers something better than poverty wages.  In the last few decades we have regressed to the wealth stratification of the 1890s. Perhaps now we can return to the majority view of the 1930s that unions have a positive role to play in a stable, healthy economy.

I moved from Puerto Rico to Boston for better work and a better future for my children. For the last two years I have been working as a cleaner at Logan International Airport.  Two years, two jobs, the same airport, but worlds apart.

Low pay, abuse and disrespect were common currency when I worked as a cabin cleaner for my previous employer. I earned $8 an hour, working nights and as many extra hours as I could in order to support my family.

But this meant that I couldn’t spend time with my four children, and no matter how much I worked, I couldn’t pay all my bills. I needed government help to cover my heating costs, health care, and childcare. It got so bad for a time that my children and girlfriend lived in a homeless shelter while I stayed with friends.

I wasn’t the only one going through this. For me and my co-workers, not being able to pay bills, relying on government assistance, and even being separated from our families were all too common.

Then, when I talked with my coworkers about forming a union in order to change our work conditions, I was fired.

Luckily, I found another job. This time cleaning at Logan with a union company. The union changed my life.

Angel participating in at a Fight for $15 rally in Boston.

Instead of poverty wages I now get paid $17 an hour, I have quality health care that my company provides, and paid sick and vacation days. My company takes health and safety seriously. And if I have a problem at work, the union can work with the company to solve it.

Today, my family is all by my side and under one roof. We are financially stable and have a better life. I can take a vacation day from time to time to spend time with my kids.

My former non-union coworkers work hard every day and want a better life for their families too. The only difference between us is that I have a union, and that changed everything.

I continue to tell my story and stand with my former coworkers because they deserve the same thing I have—decent wages, economic stability, and respect on the job that comes with a union contract. It is also what the Fight for 15 workers are fighting for and deserve.

We are strong when we are together and that’s why I’m proud to be a union member. Shouldn’t that be the norm?

The pressure-cooking job conditions people working at McDonald’s described are not unique to the Golden Arches. I’ve met men and women from all walks of life who are working fast and furiously and with little reward. For far too long, we’ve allowed profitable corporations to ignore the basic well-being and needs of everyday Americans. Even as the cost of living goes up, wealthy CEOs have been hell-bent on keeping wages down, pocketing almost everything their employees produce for the company. This leaves our friends and neighbors who work for these incredibly profitable corporations living on the brink.

But this week, fast-food workers are going on strike to protest unsafe jobs and unfair pay. This time, they will be joined by Walmart associates and other retail employees, as well as caregivers, adjunct professors, and others who have had enough of working and still not being able to make ends meet. On April 15, they’re using their collective voice to demand a better economic system – one that provides families with decent jobs and a starting wage of $15 an hour.

Yes, I said $15 an hour. Not $9, and not $10. These strikes were started by fast-food cooks and cashiers, but the movement has grown, and the response has been quite telling. Recently, Walmart, McDonald’s, Target and The Gap have all responded to workers’ demands, announcing moves to increase wages and some benefits for some of their workforce. Unfortunately, these minor wage hikes won’t put enough money in people’s pockets to pay the bills and take care of their families.

And when jobs don’t pay enough, workers turn to critical public assistance in order to meet their basic needs. A new study from the Labor Center at the University of California Berkeley finds that states are spending $25 billion per year on public assistance programs provided to working families. If you have a job, you shouldn’t need to rely on public assistance. But the people who help you pick out shoes or an outfit for your kids can’t access enough hours to even cover their rent. The workers taking care of our grandparents don’t even get overtime pay. And there are adjunct professors at some of our country’s largest educational institutions who are living in their cars.

Even if you haven’t experienced working in a minimum wage job, you should join together with the men and women taking on these profitable corporations. Certainly, these companies can afford to create jobs that pay people enough to actually live on, but nearly two-thirds of American households earn less money today than they did in 2002, despite the fact that corporate profits are at an all-time high. Moreover, you’re the one bearing the costs of these low-wage jobs, because these employers offset wages and benefits onto taxpayers in the form of public assistance. So even if you never stop at a Wendy’s or Taco Bell drive-thru, or you won’t set foot in a Walmart, you’re still picking up the tab for these companies’ cheap labor.

Thankfully, there are several legislative initiatives emerging to hold CEOs of major corporations accountable for refusing to pay family-sustaining wages, denying basic benefits, and shifting their responsibilities onto taxpayers. For example, in Connecticut, a proposal for a Low-Wage Employer Fee would fine large companies that pay employees less than $15 per hour. The money recovered from the fee would fund critical early childhood education and healthcare services for low-income families, many of whom work for these big corporations.

Policies such as this one aim to level the playing field—to help right the dangerous imbalance in our economy and ensure that if you do well in America, you do right by America. If we don’t stand up with those who are protesting this week, greedy corporations are going to continue to burn all of us, employees and taxpayers alike. But if we stand up together, we are heard. We are taken seriously. We make change happen.

I make around $9.50 an hour, live at home, and need financial aid to go to school.

The New York Times and others have written extensively on how the middle class is shrinking in America, how even with our economy in recovery more and more find themselves at the bottom. Many people who hear this envision fast food workers with multiple jobs struggling to make ends meet—not bank workers facing decreased salaries, demotions, and diminished job security or opportunity for promotion. But that is the reality we face every day in the finance industry—one of the most powerful industries in the world and a driving force of the American economy.

I am still lucky in a lot of ways: I am able to live with my parents, because although I help with rent there’s no way I could afford an apartment on my own; I can attend university, because I receive financial aid and there’s no way I could afford to get a degree on my own. I am lucky to be able to cover my basic necessities, but I could never afford to have a family on this salary, and it shouldn’t take luck just to get by.

Last month, I learned it doesn’t have to be this way when I met João Almeida, a bank teller from Brazil. João lives in Brasilia where he works for a Santander Bank branch and does the same job as me. We both work six to eight hours a day, opening the vault, counting the register, making deposits, and dealing with customers.  Except João enjoys a middle class life, has 30 paid vacation days per year, a health plan for his family, and a pension fund.

Why the difference? Unlike me, João has a union to represent him, protect his rights, collectively bargain, and advocate on his behalf. Thanks to these protections, the average bank worker makes around $19.32 (including monetary benefits such as food assistance and cultural passes, both of which are part of the union contract.)

When João developed a repetitive motion problem in his arm, his union made sure he could stay home with paid leave and medical costs covered. When a manager at my branch had to take leave for spinal surgery, she received a demotion to customer service upon her return. When Santander tried to impose sales goals on tellers, the union fought back and kept them from being implemented. But In the U.S., nearly every bank has unreasonable sales goals, leading to unnecessary pressure and predatory lending and sales practices. In Brazil, João’s union made sure they had ergonomic chairs and any shift over six hours is paid overtime.  While in the U.S., many tellers struggle to remain on their feet for more than eight hours straight.

The finance industry in America makes over $100 billion a year in profits. I don’t begrudge CEOs a high salary, but when they are making enough in bonuses to buy a small island while front-line workers like me struggle just to get by, something isn’t right. It’s time to end subsistence wages and offer a fair share of the profits our work helps to create.

We need to rebuild the American middle class, starting with the wealthiest and most powerful industry in our economy.

While Tippen’s life would improve modestly after receiving the small wage increase, it was clear that the raise would not lift her and her family out of poverty. Even so, she did not make any negative comments about her employer. The story also featured a quote from her manager, Herry Patel, who opposed the small increase because “everybody wants free money in Pine Bluff.” In contrast, other businesses noted that the increase would not force them to lay off employees.

Only one month later, Harlan reported that Tippen had lost her job. She claims that Patel fired her in retaliation for speaking about her experiences to The Washington Post. This event illustrates a real tension in poverty reporting, especially when stories involve vulnerable low-wage workers.

I worry about this happening every time I write about low-wage workers (or other vulnerable groups). http://t.co/I9dLjza8WB

— Ben Casselman (@bencasselman) March 30, 2015

Ben Casselman, who is the chief economics writer for FiveThirtyEight (an outlet that uses statistical analysis to cover stories), is absolutely right to be concerned. Journalists should consider the impact that their reporting could have on their sources. This is an ethical and strategic consideration – if workers feel that they will experience negative effects, they may be less likely to come forward. In this particular instance, Tippen might have benefited from the protection of anonymity. However, Harlan’s account clearly states that Patel invited him to speak to Tippen, and therefore it would have been difficult to anticipate that she would experience retaliation for her comments.  The blame here lies with the employer, not the reporter. Days Inn and Suites should reinstate Tippen immediately.

If anything, this story demonstrates that we need more coverage, not less. Harlan’s reporting makes an important point in its own right – a small minimum wage increase is not enough to lift families out of poverty. It also avoids elevating incorrect arguments which insist that increases in the minimum wage lead to layoffs.

But its Harlan’s follow-up reporting that makes an even more important point – abusive employers should be held accountable. When Tippen told Harlan that she believed she was fired for talking to him, Harlan gave her a platform to speak out. He also repeatedly followed up with Days Inn and reported on their sustained attempts to dodge his calls. Finally, Harlan made it clear that this action by Patel will have a real impact on Shanna Tippen’s life—with the loss of her job, her money “won’t last past March.”

It seems obvious that Patel is an abusive employer – he threatened to sue the paper when the story came out and blatantly tried to use Tippen’s criminal record to smear her and cast doubt on her credibility. Harlan’s reporting on Tippen’s firing amounts to a public shaming of Patel on a national stage. Thanks to Tippen’s courage to speak out and Harlan’s work, hopefully some employers will think twice about retaliating against employees who talk to the press about low wages and bad working conditions. In fact, increased press scrutiny could decrease abuses across the board.

This is especially key in states like Arkansas, where the media is one of the few institutions with the strength to hold employers accountable. Arkansas is a right-to-work state, meaning that non-union members are allowed to free ride and gain the advantages of union contracts without paying dues. This state of affairs is correlated with weaker unions, and Arkansas’ unionization rates are dismal: only 4.7% of employed workers are members of a union; and only 5.4% of workers in the state are represented by a union (meaning they report no union affiliation but are covered under a union contract).

The law allows employers to terminate employment for practically any reason unless there is an agreement stating otherwise—for example, a union contract—or if an employee is terminated on the basis of age, sex, race, religion, national origin or disability. This creates a Catch-22: the unions that are best-situated to secure agreements protecting employees’ speech have been marginalized by state policies. If Tippen had been unionized, Patel would have thought twice about firing her for speaking out. Instead, he seemingly believed he could retaliate against her without fear of backlash. Without The Post’s efforts, he would have succeeded.

It’s also important to consider how Arkansas’ policies impacted Tippen’s economic situation in the first place. Arkansas’ status as a right-to-work state and the correlated lack of union strength have likely reduced wages.  According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, low-wage workers in right-to-work states earn “approximately $1,500 less per year than a similar worker in a state without such a law.” In addition, in states with policies that inhibit collective bargaining, workers are forced to rely on state and national legislators to lift the wage floor. Given the refusal of legislators to even raise wages enough to account for inflation, earning a non-poverty wage through a legislative path seems highly unlikely.

The worst result of this story, by far, would be for journalists to shy away from giving low-wage workers a chance to speak out. A strong and aggressive media presence that includes protections for sources will reduce the chance of retaliation and encourage workers to talk about their experiences.  We also need strong unions to counter abusive employers while securing better wages and working conditions for all workers.

The figure below shows changes in real hourly wages throughout the wage distribution between 2013 and 2014. What is particularly striking is that almost every decile and the 95th percentile experienced real wage declines from 2013 to 2014, with two exceptions. First, there was a very small increase at the 40th percentile wage, up 3 cents, or 0.3 percent. But a more economically significant increase occurred at the 10th percentile where hourly wages were up 11 cents, or 1.3 percent.

So, why did wages at the bottom tick up when they fell for nearly everyone else? What is so special about that wage that sits below 90 percent and above 10 percent of workers (i.e., is not generally earned by particularly privileged workers)?

The answer is simple: we still have some labor standards that provide wage protections. More specifically, 18 states increased their minimum wage in 2014 (either through legislation or through automatic inflation adjustments). The states with minimum wage increases in 2014, displayed in green below, represent 57 percent of the workforce.

When we compare states with and without a minimum wage increase, we find clear evidence that the minimum wage is the reason people at the 10^th percentile wage didn’t see the negative trends found elsewhere in the workforce. The figure below compares the wages in these states with those in states without minimum wage increases. Wages at the 10^th percentile rose by 1.6% in states with minimum wage increases, while in states without such an increase, they pretty much stagnated—increasing by a scant 0.3%.

The great news in this story is that policy can actually affect the labor market. And, it is imperative that we use all the policy levers at our disposal to help rejuvenate the economy, create jobs, and build stronger wage and income growth for the 99%. 

Linda lives at a local shelter with two children. She works full-time in the health care industry and earns $8 per hour, resulting in a yearly income of $16,640 before taxes. Even in the unlikely event Linda were to find an apartment for less than $600 per month with cheap utilities, she would still have only $200 left for all of her other monthly bills, including food, clothing, transportation, child care, and health care. Finding an apartment she can afford also might mean living in a neighborhood where it is difficult to get to work.

Linda’s story of struggling from paycheck-to-paycheck is one that we hear far too often in Louisville and across the nation. Unfortunately, Congress and our state legislature have both failed to raise the current $7.25 an hour minimum wage. Now, low-wage workers in Louisville have placed their hope in the hands of the Louisville Metro Council and Mayor Greg Fisher.

The current proposal supported by workers and advocates would gradually increase Louisville’s minimum wage over three years to $10.10. This is only a start, since it is significantly less than the $11.48 living wage that former Mayor Jerry Abramson called for during his tenure. Moreover, the average monthly rent in Louisville is $694 and families will need to earn $13 per hour in order to afford housing and other household expenditures.  Like Linda, more than half of the adults living in Louisville homeless shelters are employed, some working full-time.

With more than 18 percent of Louisvillians now living below the poverty line of $18,552 annually for a family of three, we must do what we can locally to raise the minimum wage so it is no longer a poverty wage. An estimated 22 percent of low-wage workers in Louisville would benefit from a minimum wage increase, including 62,500 workers who make less than $10.10, and another 24,800 workers who would indirectly benefit once wage scales were adjusted upward.

And while the opposition would have us believe that undeserving teenagers working in the fast food industry will primarily benefit from an increased minimum wage, the fact is that among affected workers the average age is 35 years old; more than one-third are at least 40 years old; and most of the workers are women.  I hear the opposition clearly when they say that there may be minimal job loss, or that raising the minimum wage will not end poverty; and I understand that some businesses may have to increase their prices.

But the cost of goods and services is already increasing every year without the benefit of a minimum wage increase. And while raising the minimum wage will not end poverty, it will indeed help move some people out of poverty, and others who are on the cusp of poverty will no longer need assistance.

In order to help businesses adapt to increased wages, sponsors of the Louisville minimum wage legislation intentionally designed it to increase gradually over three years. We are committed to supporting businesses and we have proven that repeatedly by providing economic development incentives. During the last decade, we have used tax dollars to give tax breaks to the Yum Center, General Electric, Kentucky Kingdom, Colonial Gardens, and Cordish Companies, just to name a few beneficiaries. Now we are asking businesses to invest in their workers.  I know that there are areas of agreement that should be our focus: reducing income inequality, creating job stability, establishing fair wages, promoting compassion, and reducing poverty. We can get there and raising the minimum wage is a good start.

As the Labor and Economic Development Committee of the Louisville Metro Council prepares to vote on the minimum wage ordinance on December 4, I hope that we keep in mind that we simply cannot afford the price of poverty and we cannot afford to ignore working families. We can and we should raise the wage in Louisville.

Good morning, my name is Virgil Pack, I’m 45-years-old and I live in Richmond, Virginia. I’m a father of two kids—a daughter and a son. My daughter’s name is Ashleigh, she’s 21 and attending UDC in her junior year. My son’s name is Sean, he’s 13 and lives in Albany, NY.

I have worked in the restaurant industry for most of my life. I have three jobs and work about 65 hours a week but every month is a struggle to make ends meet. I’m a crew trainer for Wendy’s where I make $7.75 an hour; I’m a shift manager at Sonic’s Drive-In where I make $11.00 an hour and unfortunately they’re cutting my hours; and for my third job, I’m a crewmember at Moe’s Southwest Grill where I make $7.75 an hour.

This means that at the end of each month, I have $915 to pay for rent, utilities, and more. I pay child support for my son, Sean, which is payroll deducted from Wendy’s.  I also help my daughter Ashleigh with college.  I have absolutely no benefits at any of my jobs—no health insurance, no paid sick leave.  I have 2 years of college under my belt and I used to run my own business, but in this economy, this is the only work I can find. God forbid I get seriously ill or injured, I’d probably be homeless.

Like the federal minimum wage, Virginia’s minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, which you can see is just simply not a livable wage. And to make low and inadequate wages even worse, the lack of benefits makes it that much harder to get by: without paid sick days or paid leave, I’m forced to choose between going to work sick or losing needed income to support my family, or possibly even losing my job, and if there’s a family emergency I have to choose between the same impossible choices.

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However, I am excited to say that I have an appointment with a navigator on Thursday of this week to enroll in a health insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act. The idea that I will shortly have health insurance is such a huge weight off my shoulders and an absolute blessing for me and my family.  However, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Without higher wages and better quality jobs, I’ll still be running in place.

In Virginia, raising the wage would affect over 744,000 workers, which is more than 20 percent of the workforce.  And many people like me, work so hard, yet with wages so low and no paid leave or other benefits, we’re stuck or falling behind. Not only would raising the wage enable families like mine to put more food on the table and know that we can pay rent each month, it would make us feel appreciated and respected as workers.

I would like to take the time to say that I’m not up here for sympathy but I would like for people to see that there are Americans trying to live right and would like a fair chance at the American dream, which to me is family and prosperity….

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this opportunity.

“I realized that even though my daughter was the one in the program, our whole family was benefiting,” he says. “The teachers taught us to be hands-on parents, and to set aside family time to eat together, talk, and share together.”

The program provided more than just child care, it helped the whole family.

For low-income families like Israel’s, poverty complicates every aspect of their daily lives, from holding a job, to finding transportation, to raising healthy children. For these families, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent executive order raising the hourly minimum wage from $11.90 to $13.13 for employees at projects that receive more than $1 million in city financing is an important step forward.  Contrary to misconceptions about people in poverty, these families work, and they work hard. In fact, there are 265,000 low-income families in New York City with at least one working parent. The new wage will increase the annual income of thousands of workers from $16,640 to $27,310, lifting a family of four above the federal poverty line.

While an increased minimum wage will be an enormous help to struggling families, it isn’t enough. We need to invest in other work supports that ease the economic strain on families and create thriving communities.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that to achieve a “modest living standard,” a family of four needs $94,676 to live in New York City, including over $2,000 for child care each month. When even middle class parents are “crushed by the cost of child care,” you know that low-income families are feeling the pain even more. In the state of New York, the average cost of an infant child care center consumes 58% of the state median income for a single mother. One study found that child care is the single greatest expense among low-income families in the city.

That is why access to early childhood education, quality childcare, and after-school programs should be implemented hand-in-hand with minimum wage raises—they serve as a multiplier of a family’s earned income because parents don’t have to pay for costly or unsafe child care, and they also allow parents to go to work. The proof is in the data: More than 70% of New York City parents with kids in an after-school program said that the program made it easier for them to keep their jobs; that they missed less work; and that they were able to work more hours. Low-income parents with child care subsidies are also less likely to have child care disruptions that hold back their careers or result in job loss.

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These programs are an investment in our future too. The Child Center of NY works with some of the most impoverished communities in New York City, in neighborhoods like South Jamaica, Corona, and Far Rockaway.  Every day we meet hardworking parents who seek our services because they want their children to learn and succeed—to interact positively with their peers, form relationships with adult mentors, and learn outside of the classroom too.  We also work with whole families to help them achieve their goals too.

When Israel came to our Head Start program it was perfectly clear that he knew the value of hard work.  His own parents had worked long hours at multiple jobs when he was growing up.

“They didn’t have much time to spend with us,” he says. “I wanted more for my family than that.”

Our staff encouraged him to be involved with his daughter and her class. He began helping in the classroom and encouraged other fathers to do the same. He ran for president of the program’s Parent Council and won, and became more involved with his children at home too.

By the time both of his children had completed our Head Start program, Israel had developed his leadership skills, which in turn helped him find investors in the community so he could open a barbershop. Now, five years later, Israel owns the shop—a neighborhood institution just a few blocks away from the Head Start program. He has eight employees and earns more money working fewer hours than he did prior to starting his own business. He spends the extra time with his children and is currently planning to renovate and expand his shop.

Israel says The Child Center gave him the confidence and the means to strengthen his relationships with his children and to grow his business. In our poorest neighborhoods, there are countless men and women who want to do the same—to work hard and make a better life for their families and communities.

Decent wages and quality affordable childcare will create new opportunities to do both.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify which workers will receive the New York City wage increase.

But winning a robust minimum wage is only half of the battle.

Last month, Seattle again made history when Mayor Ed Murray announced the creation of a citywide Division of Labor Standards Enforcement to enforce its minimum wage law and other labor standards. A key feature of the new division is that it utilizes community groups as partners in outreach and to educate workers about their rights.

Because wage theft is so common in industries that employ minimum wage workers, only an effective, strategic enforcement system will ensure that workers receive the new wage they are entitled to.  Fortunately, we know how wage theft happens and we know the kinds of enforcement techniques that result in low-wage workers being paid their due.

A landmark 2009 study of nearly 4,500 low-wage workers in three of the cities currently considering a minimum wage increase—Los Angeles, Chicago and New York—found that more than two in three workers experienced at least one pay-related violation during their previous work week. Of these workers, one in four was paid less than the minimum wage, and three in four were not paid their overtime wages. Wage theft costs workers and their families in these three cities an estimated $56 million every week—that’s $56 million stolen weekly from workers’ pockets instead of helping their families and communities.

We also know the people who are the victims of wage theft. Government statistics and private studies show that they work in restaurants and hotels, retail and grocery stores. They clean office buildings and care for our children and elders. They build our homes.

Relying on government alone to right these wrongs simply doesn’t work—government has neither the resources nor the manpower. The U.S. Department of Labor has slightly more than 1,000 investigators who are responsible for protecting the rights of 135 million workers in 7.5 million businesses nationwide. Things aren’t any better at the state level, where the ratio of investigators to workers is approximately 1 to 150,000.

We also know that enforcement doesn’t work if it relies solely on workers filing complaints. A study of the largely complaint-based federal system found that for every one complaint received, there are more than 100 other labor-standards violations that go undetected, allowing unscrupulous employers to fly under the radar. One reason workers don’t complain is that nearly half of those who suffer wage theft also face retaliation for speaking up about it.

The fact is that enforcement of existing laws is so poor that the average employer has a less than 0.001 percent chance annually of being investigated by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.  That doesn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of scofflaws.

But just as surely as we know the challenges to effective enforcement, we also know how we can change this status quo and secure compliance—through an enforcement agency that has strong penalties at its disposal to deter and correct violations.  We also know from lessons learned in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Florida, and New York—in industries ranging from construction to hospitality to janitorial to agriculture—that community groups must play a critical role in enforcement.

Successful enforcement partnerships take advantage of the strengths of both government and community groups. City agencies have the power to file complaints, assess significant penalties, and take wage thieves to court. But even the best-trained investigator can’t possibly know the industries in every city and can’t be in all places at once. Community groups do and are.

Non-profits—based in our neighborhoods and knowledgeable about their industries, languages and cultures—can help spread the word to both employers and employees about minimum wage protections and other labor standards. Community based organizations can also support victims of wage theft who—fearing retaliation—don’t want to take a complaint directly to a city official. They can interview workers and witnesses and assemble the necessary proof in an atmosphere of trust.

Community groups also have vital information that supports strategic enforcement. It is an inefficient use of limited enforcement resources for investigators to wait for complaints to come in, or to investigate every industry equally. Existing violation data and the experiences of the US Department of Labor demonstrate that by focusing attention on high-violation industries and fractured employment relationships—like subcontracting and franchising—enforcement agencies are much more effective in discovering abuses and taking action to stop them. Community groups have contact with working people every day and can help city agencies investigate known violators. Business can play a role, too, by pointing out bad actors who gain a competitive advantage over responsible employers by breaking the law.

In short, through these partnerships, city enforcers are able to focus on correcting and deterring violations. They can assess penalties and award back wages to a degree that makes it very clear that our cities and states will no longer tolerate cheaters.

We can make the promise of a higher minimum wage a reality for millions of our neighbors and co-workers.  By establishing a Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and funding community-based outreach, Seattle is moving in the right direction.  Other cities should take note.

“We can’t survive on 7.25!” they chanted as cars zoomed by. When the light was red, they shouted at the cars, “Honk for 15!” Many drivers happily obliged.

This was the first in a series of actions held last Thursday in concert with workers across the country fighting for a minimum wage increase. The “Fight for 15” campaign, named after the goal of attaining a $15 minimum wage, is backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), community-based organizations like Atlanta Jobs With Justice, and many individual workers.

For several workers, this was not the first action they attended for wage increases.

“This is my third one,” said Armondo, a local Burger King employee. “My manager and I got into it a little bit because I’m supposed to be at work. But this is important, so I’m here.”

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Keyona, who also works at Burger King, has been involved in other actions too.  “This is like my fourth time. It’s all right—trying to get more money for us to live [comfortably],” she told me.

According to Armondo, the group of about 40 workers and organizers meets three times a month to plan actions like these. They are mostly fast food workers from a number of different establishments, including Taco Bell, Zaxby’s and Domino’s.

Thursday’s actions, however, included a number of home care workers as well.  Marie has been a home care worker for 26 years and is also a fast food worker.  She lives and works in a group home Friday through Sunday; works as a delivery driver for Domino’s pizza Monday through Thursday evenings; and watches children in her home Monday through Friday during the day.

Even with three jobs, Marie still has trouble making ends meet. “The rent was due on the first. It’s the third. I haven’t got it,” she said. “The car insurance is $200. I haven’t got it. The gas bill is $143. I haven’t got it.”

With low wages and few hours, the workers often need assistance to support themselves and their families. “I make just enough to pay rent,” Armondo said.  “I have to ask for help from my family for other things.”

Some, like Yolanda, also a Burger King employee, qualify for some government assistance, but still need to ask family for help. “I don’t work enough hours for childcare [assistance], but I qualify for food stamps. If it wasn’t for my mother, I wouldn’t even be able to work because I wouldn’t have anybody to watch my child.”

Keyona echoed similar challenges; “I get food stamps, but you can’t pay bills with food stamps.”

When people are unable to pay their bills, it doesn’t just affect them. “When you have to ask your 23-year-old daughter to help you pay your cell phone bill, that is humiliating,” Marie said.

Bringing in home care workers like Marie is part of a broader effort to make the Fight for 15 movement more inclusive and far-reaching. Rather than pushing for higher pay and better working conditions for a specific group, SEIU and its partners are fighting for changes to the minimum wage at the municipal, state and national level that would impact all workers. The Center for Community Change—where I am a Writing Fellow—is one of the organizations that is actively supporting Fight for 15 efforts nationwide.

So far, the campaign’s efforts appear to be paying off. Since the Fight for 15 started about two years ago, 13 states as well as 10 city and county governments have raised their minimum wages.  Seattle raised its wage to a groundbreaking $15 an hour, and San Francisco residents will vote in November on whether their city will do the same. We certainly have not seen the end of the fast food worker strikes.  The only question that remains is how many more states and municipalities will join the growing ranks of those that are doing the right thing and raising the minimum wage?

For Marie, taking part in the actions is important.  “When I do this, I know it doesn’t stop with me,” she said. “We’re not just speaking up for ourselves; we’re speaking up for all the workers out there like us.”

It’s not the first time I’ve lived on minimum wage. I’ve held jobs at a temp agency, call center, nursing home, in food service, and on the assembly line—all jobs that paid the minimum or barely above it. But back then, my situation was different. I shared a very small apartment with three friends, I hadn’t started my own family yet, and minimum wage hadn’t lost so much of its value.

That’s why the #LivetheWage challenge was eye-opening for me. Together with members of Congress and thousands of advocates across the country, I lived on a minimum wage budget for a week. Spending just $77 on our food, transportation and all incidental expenses, we hoped to gain just a small understanding of the tough decisions faced by minimum wage workers every day.

I only had to live on this budget for one week. I paid for grocery staples and gas. I couldn’t afford fresh, healthy vegetables. Peanut butter or egg salad was my daily lunch. I kept checking my gas gauge and didn’t drive anywhere but to and from work.  By the end of the week, I worried about whether I’d have enough money even to do that. There was nothing else – no latte, no haircut, no school clothes for my grandkids. I did buy a set of flashcards for my grandson. He needed to practice his multiplication, and school was starting in two weeks. But it meant I had to cut my food and gas expenses even more.

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To say the “Challenge” was a challenge is an understatement, and I didn’t have to support my family on that amount.  However countless other working women continue to struggle on poverty wages. People like 9to5 member Crystal Whetstone; she works at a discount retailer in Dayton, Ohio and her highest raise in the last seven years was 25 cents. Crystal lives with her parents because she can’t afford to live alone. She can’t pay off her student debt. She can’t get ahead. Or Barbara Gertz, who has had days when she can’t even afford transportation to her job at Walmart.

It’s been five years since Congress last raised the minimum wage, and the tipped minimum wage hasn’t budged since 1991. It’s past time for jobs that pay decent wages – wages that boost the lives of women and families, and help our communities thrive. Women are now the primary or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American households – when women do well, our economy does well.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to those struggling day in and day out to make ends meet.

“Raising the minimum wage would give my household a needed boost. I could contribute more to my household for groceries and bills and maybe even buy myself something nice every once in a while,” says Peggy Jackson, a 9to5 member from Atlanta, Ga. “Those of us earning minimum wage are trapped in a cycle of poverty because we’ll never be able to save enough money to get ahead.”

Peggy is right, and those of us who took the Challenge have a better appreciation of just how right she is.  It’s time to #RaiseTheWage now!

When we talk about poverty it’s difficult to track—and give voice to—all of the different ideas around causes and solutions that need attention. Multiply those competing demands exponentially and you may get a feel for what working people in some of the fastest growing job sectors in our economy face every day.

Shift workers—especially those in the retail sector—are subject to unpredictable and erratic scheduling practices that make it nearly impossible to plan their lives and earn a stable income. An increasing number of these workers simply aren’t able to get the hours they need in order to support their families. They are essentially trapped in a cycle of poverty, with little time or resources to make any progress toward escaping it.

These are workers who aren’t living paycheck to paycheck; they’re living hour to hour.

How can people working under these conditions set a budget?  How do they schedule medical appointments or arrange care for their children?  In addition to dealing with their erratic schedules, retail workers are often required to be on call—making sure they are available without any guarantee of a shift.

So while increasing the minimum wage is indeed a critical step in the fight against poverty, it is just one piece of a much larger, broken system in the low-wage sector.

That’s why the Schedules That Work Act—introduced last month by Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), along with Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—is so critical. It would allow every worker to have a say in their schedules—whether someone is experiencing erratic shifts, or too many hours, or needs a schedule accommodation in order to meet an obligation. By giving workers the right to request a predictable or flexible schedule, this legislation would increase job quality in our country.

At the local level, city and state governments are also demanding that the largest, most profitable retail corporations do right by their workers.

Last week, Jobs With Justice San Francisco led a coalition of labor, community, advocacy and small-business groups in introducing a groundbreaking Retail Workers Bill of Rights ordinance. The measure, authored by San Francisco Board of Supervisors members Eric Mar and David Chiu, would create new protections for retail workers who are burdened with on-call scheduling and diminished hours. The ordinance would only apply to profitable, large chain retailers—banks, fast food and restaurant chains, department stores—companies that clearly have the means to improve labor standards. If adopted, the bill would require fair scheduling practices like advance notice, adequate on-call pay, and more opportunities for part-time workers to transition to full time-employment. It would also require employers to offer more hours to current part-time employees prior to hiring additional part-time staff.

Without these kinds of reforms to scheduling and hours in the low-wage sector, we will continue to have too many people working two and three jobs but stuck below the poverty line. Nationwide, nearly eight million people are involuntarily working part-time hours. That leaves them vulnerable to poverty—nearly one in four involuntarily part-time workers lives in poverty, compared to one in 20 full-time workers. These low-quality jobs also impact the broader community because employers shift costs—particularly for health care for their workers—to our already overburdened public systems.

We need 21st century policies to address the new 21st-century workplace. Efforts like the Schedules That Work Act and the Retail Workers Bill of Rights are more than just commonsense bills; they are innovative ways to address poverty and inequality in our communities.

Raising the wage of federal employees and contract workers is a great step towards setting a wage floor for the entire nation. Governments are the largest employer in America, so when the feds pay their workers better, other sectors have to do the same in order to compete.

But there is much more that can be done to achieve a living wage, particularly at the local level.

According to the US Census Bureau, there are 19,492 municipal governments, 3,033 county governments, and 14,561 school districts in the United States.  Each one of them provides services to their constituents through the labor of millions of workers.  The public agencies that employ these workers represent an enormous amount of purchasing power.  Cities, counties and school district can follow the lead of President Obama and reform their procurement processes in order to raise wages for their workers.

Employees in positions that are traditionally public service jobs are particularly vulnerable to wage reductions when their positions are outsourced. For example, in New Jersey, K-12 school food service workers had their wages cut an average of $4 to 6 per hour—and many of their health insurance benefits wiped out—when their jobs were outsourced to companies like Aramark, Sodexo and Compass. At the time of the study, food service companies had among the highest levels of employees and their children enrolled in the New Jersey FamilyCare program, driving up poverty and likely costing taxpayers far more than any savings realized through privatization.

Similarly, Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) outsources 47% of its fixed-route bus service to Veolia and First Transit. The general manager of the RTD admits that the cost savings from the outsourced service are largely due to cuts in employee compensation. The starting pay for bus drivers employed by RTD is $15.49 per hour, compared to $12.25 for drivers with private contractors.

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And In December 2009, Milwaukee County outsourced nearly 90 janitors responsible for cleaning public buildings. Working for the county, these employees earned between $13.95 and $15.75 per hour plus benefits. When the service was outsourced, the contractor paid $8.00 per hour with no benefits. With families to support, many of the workers—who had more than 10 years of experience with Milwaukee County—couldn’t afford to take the degraded jobs.

Cities can enact legislation that requires contractors to pay their employees a living wage and provide reasonable benefits. Many cities have already passed “living wage ordinances” and more should follow their lead. And while these laws are a good first step, it should also be noted that the mandated wage levels too often fall short of what would truly be a family-sustaining wage.

Some public agencies are beginning to set new standards. For example, this month the Los Angeles Unified School District raised the minimum wage to $15 per hour for its service workers who keep the schools clean, safe and operating. Service Employees International Union Local 99 advocated for the new contract—which received unanimous support from the school board and was strongly supported by the district’s Superintendent. The contract is an example of how management, public service employees and elected leaders can come together to find a solution that pays a living wage and benefits everyone.

Raising the wage floor for everyone who works for the federal, state, or local government—or for an employer that benefits from government contracts—would increase the minimum wage for the majority of American workers. Other employers would also have to raise wages to compete for talent in the labor market.

In an era of rising income and wealth inequality, these are concrete steps our elected leaders can take to make communities more equitable and our families more financially secure.

Over the years, these protections have been what safeguards the right to a minimum wage, overtime pay, health and safety protections, and the right to form a union. Without them, low-wage workers—the very people on whom we rely on a daily basis—are disempowered and often trapped in poverty.

These excluded sectors have banded together to create worker centers—non-profit, community organizations representing specific occupational sectors—mostly made up of “immigrant workers and African-Americans who labor in jobs that do not pay a livable wage.” The first crop of worker centers emerged over two decades ago in response to the waning power of traditional labor organizing and the unique needs of laborers of color.  They provided a critical community touch point in advocating and organizing for just workplace practices. Since then, they have grown to create national bodies representing all major sectors, and include: the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Guestworker Alliance, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, among others. By one estimate, there are now over 200 worker centers across the United States fighting for fair wages, paid leave, and other workplace protections.

Today, low-wage industries employ 1.85 million more workers than at the beginning of the 2008 recession and represent some of the fastest growing sectors in the economy. These industries include restaurant work, retail, and caregiving, all of which have high volumes of immigrants, people of color, and women in the workforce. When we see that these same people also make up a disproportionate amount of working Americans living in poverty—earning a fraction of the wages of their white, male counterparts—we should look to their employers for answers.

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The $600 billion restaurant industry, specifically, is the largest employer of people of color in the United States. Thirty-nine percent of all workers making the minimum wage or below work in this industry, making it the largest low-wage employer. Simply raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would increase the combined incomes of people of color by $16.1 billion—nearly 300,000 of those affected would be workers of color in the restaurant industry. Additionally, 2 in 3 tipped workers are women, and the tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 per hour since 1991. All of this points to the fact that at the frontlines of the gender and racial wage gap, workers making poverty wages are bravely taking on giant, moneyed interests like the restaurant industry. This is truly the David and Goliath story of our time.

In some cases, workers are winning. Last year, ROC United was instrumental in securing paid sick days for tipped workers in Washington, D.C. The National Domestic Workers Alliance also successfully fought to provide minimum wage and overtime protections for homecare workers.

In many ways, worker centers are a contemporary economic necessity. Since people of color are the rising majority, it is imperative that we improve job quality in sectors that currently employ these workers at high rates. Worker centers become even more needed as traditional labor organizations and workers’ rights are threatened in Congress, in individual states, and in the Supreme Court with the recent Harris v Quinn decision.

Nearly 51 years ago, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, activists called for not only desegregation, but also dignified jobs and decent wages.  And tomorrow at 10:00am ET, the Center for American Progress marks the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act—which included historic protections at the workplace—with an event: “Passing the Baton: The Next 50 Years of Civil Rights and Economic Justice”.  Watch live as an intergenerational group of civil rights activists offers ideas about how to renew and invigorate a movement focused on civil rights and economic security.

Many low-wage workers are already leading the way.  This is an opportunity to find new ways to get involved.