When families can afford the basics, they can reinvest in their communities, and higher wages means a broader consumer base for businesses.
Income inequality and wage stagnation finally took their place among the principal moral issues of our time.
When workers make more money, they respond by being more productive in their jobs and are less likely to leave, reducing turnover costs. This puts money in business' pockets, and workers also then have more money to spend in the local economy.
People decide what markets should do - they are not a force of nature.
Most fast-food workers can't easily join a union, because they don't work directly for their parent company, such as McDonald's or Subway. Instead, they work for individual franchise owners, ensuring that each individual fast-food outlet would have to organize and win union recognition separately. So there's not one central employer to bargain with, as in a traditional union campaign.
The minimum wage isn't earned only by people working at fast food restaurants and in service industry work - the average income for positions like nursing assistants, preschool teachers and paramedics are all under $15.
Today, the gap between productivity and compensation for the typical worker is larger than at any time since World War II.
The vast majority (over 80 percent) of fast-food and similar low wage service jobs (<$9.24/hr) are held by adults. A quarter are adults over 40. Another quarter are moms raising kids.
The fast-food industry is notorious for employing millions of Americans at poverty wages.
Businesses generally deal with minimum wage increases by finding efficiencies in their business practices or slightly increasing prices if they have to, not cutting jobs. Of course: because they need staff to make their businesses run!
Annual earnings in the fast-food industry are well below the income needed for self-sufficiency, and fast-food industry jobs are also much less likely than other jobs to provide health benefits.
Fast food also has a uniquely difficult business structure for workers to achieve better wages and working conditions.
The free market hasn't done a very good job "figuring out" how to pay workers enough. If it was solely up to the market, the people with the least power would be paid pennies ... or less.
We've created more wealth in the past 30 years than the rest of human of human history combined. But half of Americans make less than $17 an hour.
A September 2015 poll found that, by a 3-1 margin, voters are more likely to support political candidates who favor raising the minimum wage.
