The Fight for $15: How 200 Fast-Food Workers Changed the Wage Map

On the morning of November 29, 2012, about 200 fast-food workers walked off their jobs at McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut locations across New York City. It was, by multiple accounts from that day, the largest coordinated strike the American fast-food industry had ever seen. A McDonald’s worker named Darryl Young explained himself that morning:

Good morning I’m on strike Wanna know why? $7.25

Young had worked at McDonald’s for two years and still made the federal minimum wage. A McDonald’s manager named Diego Delgado, three years in and up to $8.50 an hour, put his reason more simply: “I’m here for the union.”

Neither man got $15 that week. Nor did a KFC worker in East Harlem, identified only as Gregory in that day’s coverage, who earned minimum wage, relied on food stamps, and lived in Rockaway, Queens, which Superstorm Sandy’s floodwaters had inundated weeks earlier. New York City employed roughly 50,000 fast-food workers at the time, in an industry whose revenue that year approached $200 billion nationally. What Young, Delgado, and Gregory started is now credited, by the research group that tracks it, with more than 26 million workers sharing a combined $150 billion in raises over the following decade, while the number on their signs became law in dozens of cities and states. The federal minimum wage they were picketing has not moved at all.

Why the number was $15

The number on Young’s sign was not picked at random. Congress last raised the federal minimum wage on July 24, 2009. It has sat at $7.25 an hour ever since, the longest stretch without a raise since the federal minimum wage law took effect in 1938, according to Business for a Fair Minimum Wage’s count. A worker at $7.25 who gets forty hours a week, every week, grosses $15,080 a year before taxes. Workers who depend on tips have it worse: the federal tipped minimum wage has been $2.13 an hour since 1991, on the theory that customers make up the difference. Fifteen dollars an hour was simple math against that baseline: roughly double the wage floor, and a number that fit on a sign.

SEIU, and the union half of the slogan

The walkout did not organize itself. New York Communities for Change built the campaign for months beforehand, canvassing fast-food workers store by store, and the Service Employees International Union backed it with money and meeting space at its Manhattan headquarters. SEIU’s own name for the resulting campaign said exactly what it wanted: Fight for $15 and a Union. The wage number got the headlines. The union half of the slogan was the part SEIU had been chasing since long before 2012, in an industry where almost nobody was organized and almost nobody had bargaining power to show for it. More than a decade of strikes has not changed that in the way a strike usually changes it: no McDonald’s restaurant in the country has a certified union, because the franchise model means each location would have to organize and win its own separate election, one at a time, forever, if it wanted to.

One walkout becomes a hundred cities

New York’s one-day action did not stay a one-day action. Organizing under the name Fast Food Forward, SEIU called a repeat strike on August 29, 2013 that reached workers in about 60 cities, then a second one on December 5, 2013 that reached about 100 cities, the biggest showing the campaign had managed yet. No city had actually raised its minimum wage. What had grown, in the year since Young and Delgado walked out, was the tactic itself: a coordinated one-day strike, repeatable in any city with a franchise and a union organizer willing to knock on doors.

SeaTac gets there first

The first place in the country to actually reach $15 an hour was not a city most Americans could find on a map. SeaTac, Washington, population under thirty thousand, is built around the airport it is named for. On November 5, 2013, its voters narrowly approved Proposition 1, by a margin of 77 votes out of roughly 6,000 cast, setting a $15 minimum wage for hospitality and transportation workers. It took effect January 1, 2014. A King County judge initially ruled the wage could not reach workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport itself, on the theory that the Port of Seattle’s exclusive control of airport operations overrode the city’s law. The Washington Supreme Court disagreed, 5 to 4, on August 20, 2015, extending the $15 wage to the roughly 4,700 people working there for airport contractors, concessionaires, and rental car agencies.

Seattle makes it law

Seattle followed its smaller neighbor within months. On June 2, 2014, the Seattle City Council passed, unanimously, an ordinance phasing in a $15 minimum wage citywide: big employers (over 500 employees) first, reaching $15 by 2017, and small businesses given until 2021, with an interim combined wage-and-benefits threshold applying to small employers starting in 2019. The United Steelworkers, among others, called it the highest minimum wage in the country at the time.

California takes it statewide

Sacramento went further than any single city could. On April 4, 2016, Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 3, phasing in a $15 minimum wage across the entire state by 2022, with an extra year, until 2023, for businesses with 25 or fewer employees. Brown had resisted a statewide $15 wage for months, and his own bill moved only once a labor-backed ballot initiative carrying the identical number, the Fair Wage Act of 2016, was working its way toward the November ballot. At the signing, Brown described it plainly: “This is about economic justice, it’s about people.”

The federal number never moved

Congress had its own chance. In 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Bobby Scott introduced the Raise the Wage Act, phasing the federal minimum wage up to $15 an hour by 2025. The House passed it on July 18, 2019, by a vote of 231 to 199. The Republican-controlled Senate never scheduled a vote, and the bill died there. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour today, seventeen years after its last increase.

What ten years added up to

None of that federal inaction stopped the state and city laws from compounding. By the ten-year mark, the National Employment Law Project counted 29 states and nearly five dozen cities and counties that had raised their minimum wages since the 2012 walkout, many of them to $15 or higher. NELP put the combined total at more than 26 million workers sharing $150 billion in raises, with workers of color making up 46 percent of the people who got a raise and taking home just over $76 billion of it. Those are the movement’s own numbers, produced by a research group that supports the movement’s goals, and they measure state and local law, not anything Congress did. The same NELP report also tracked wealth, in addition to wages, in the states that raised their minimums between 2013 and 2019: it found Black worker wealth grew 174 percent and Latino worker wealth grew 211 percent in those states, narrowing the Black-white wealth gap there by 40.3 percentage points and the Latino-white gap by 29.4 points, faster narrowing than in states that left their minimums where they were.

The tipped minimum wage Young’s and Delgado’s coworkers lived on is still $2.13 an hour, unchanged since 1991. By 2026, 15 states had adopted a path to at least $15 since the first walkout, and inflation indexing had carried five more above it. Congress never took a single one of those steps.