WSJ: Fight for $15 Spurring Wage Hikes ‘At the Fastest Rate Since the Recession’

You know that the Fight for $15 is winning when even the pro-Business Wall Street Journal is touting the positive impacts of this movement we’ve built over the past 3 years.

With wages for the bottom quarter of working people in America “rising at the fastest rate since the recession,” the Wall Street Journal looks at the impact the Fight for $15 has had on big corporations — like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Nationwide Mutual Insurance, and Starbucks — that have raised pay for their frontline workers in recent years in response to minimum wage hikes and “protestors demanding a $15-an-hour national minimum wage.”

“The raises aren’t being quietly slipped into paychecks. Instead, large employers are setting a public example, putting pressure on competitors to follow suit and reaping ancillary benefits in the form of good will from employees, customers and investors,” reporters Julie Jargon and Eric Morath write. They quote Princeton Economist Alan Krueger, who says the raises hint at a corporate shift toward more profit-sharing. “It shows company wage policy is not fully dictated by the market,” Krueger said.

And the Journal reports companies raising wages are now reporting big benefits: Nationwide’s chief administrative officer, for example, says that turnover is down and employee satisfaction is up after raising wages to $15. Even McDonald’s, which only raised wages to $1 above the local minimum, and only in a fraction of its stores, is seeing results: Its chief financial officer said turnover is down.

However, this Fight is far from over. Big corporations need to work harder and do more to treat their workers right, and pay them what they deserve — ALL workers deserve $15 and union rights. We won’t stop fighting until everyone gets there.