When some 200 New York City fast food workers walked off their jobs in November 2012 to demand a $15 minimum wage and a union, no one could have predicted that the one-day strike would spark a national movement. But when workers won a $15 minimum wage in SeaTac, Washington, in 2013, and then soon after in Seattle, the movement seemed to capture the public imagination. Less than four years since it began, the Fight for $15 movement has not only united low-wage workers across the country in a call for better wages and a voice on the job, but also pushed policymakers across the country to raise state and local minimum wage laws.
Please join the Center for American Progress for a discussion with David Rolf, a leading figure in the nationwide fight for a $15 minimum wage and president of Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, 775, who will discuss his new book The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America. Rolf was instrumental in SeaTac and Seattle’s adoption of a $15 wage ordinance. His new book digs into how the long-term destabilization of the American middle class has led to increasing economic inequality and helped spark the fast food worker strikes in 2012; how policymakers are adopting a $15 minimum wage in order to help strengthen working families and reverse this trend; and what more needs to be done to rebuild the American middle class and the economy.
Copies of The Fight for $15 will be available for sale at the event.
Welcoming remarks:
Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress
Featured author:
David Rolf, author, The Fight for Fifteen: The Right Wage for a Working America, and International Vice President of the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and President of SEIU 775, which represents more than 44,000 long-term care workers in the Pacific Northwest
Moderated by:
Lydia DePillis, former reporter at The Washington Post who will join the Houston Chronicle in May