In late 2012, service workers around the country began rallying under a then-revolutionary idea: raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Now, 13 years after the "FightFor15" campaign began, 15 states either have at least a $15 minimum wage or will have one in the next several years. In the 2024 general election, Alaska and Missouri joined that fast-growing group.
In the months following passage of Missouri's Proposition A, which aimed to raise Missouri’s minimum wage and secure mandatory sick paid leave, the ballot initiative was challenged by state lawmakers and large businesses. Though certain components of the measure were blocked, January 1 will still see minimum-wage workers in Missouri making $15 an hour.
That still doesn’t fully meet the goal set by the FightFor15 movement: according to the U.S. Inflation Calculator, the $15 that workers first began protesting for in 2012 would be $21.18 in 2025.
Across the country, campaigns to raise the minimum wage have been popular among voters, according to Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor movements at the City University of New York. She said those efforts are popular among working-class voters, regardless of how progressive or conservative a state’s politics typically are.
“Ordinary people can't afford to pay their bills, and so they need more money,” she said.
Despite their state-level popularity, those campaigns have been much slower to impact the federal minimum wage — which has remained $7.25 an hour since 2009. Part of that reluctance comes from a fear among economists that raising the minimum wage too high, too fast could cause widespread job loss, as employers decide to eliminate positions rather than pay the new, higher wage.
That theory is controversial among those who research labor — Milkman said that more recent research suggests the view is outdated — but some economists maintain that raising the federal minimum wage wouldn’t be the best way to improve American workers’ material conditions.
Peter Mueser, who studies labor at the University of Missouri, is one such economist.
“If you set a wage that's out of whack with supply and demand, you're going to have that kind of shift occurring,” he said.
He said he wants there to be more opportunities for low-income workers to improve their skills: this would, he said, lead more people into higher-paying jobs and reduce the supply of people working in low-skilled jobs, which would drive up their wages. That strategy, he said, would help workers make more money without the risk of reducing employment.
But, he said, those aren’t the kind of ideas being discussed in modern politics.
“It's not an easy answer. In other words, it seems quite easy to just raise the minimum wage in comparison,” he said. “And historically, the minimum wage, it probably helps people at the very bottom, and the loss of jobs is probably minimal… But if you raise the minimum wage a lot, then you have the kind of dynamic I'm describing, and that's what becomes important.”
Milkman agrees that the economic situation for most people is more complicated than a simple increase in the minimum wage would fix — she suggested that some local governments have seen success with supporting expenses like rent and childcare — but she says that wages are a component of bringing ordinary Americans out of poverty.
“This issue is not red-blue,” she said. “There's no affordability for working people. So minimum wage is one way to at least begin to fix it.”
According to the National Employment Law Project, more than 26 million workers have secured a higher pay since the FightFor15 movement first began, with a 74% average increase in worker wealth in states with higher minimum wages.
