Following Amazon's announcement that it was raising its starting pay rate to $15 an hour, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Congress should mandate the same for the entire country. But one of the few U.S. locales to actually embrace a $15 minimum wage — Flagstaff, Ariz. — is currently having second thoughts about the merits of the policy and might soon undo it. The story starts in 2016, […]

Has the Fight for $15 set its minimum wage aim even higher? In Oakland, voters will consider Measure Z, which would set a minimum wage as high as $20 an hour — that's $40,000 a year, full-time — for the city's hotel employees. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors recently reached a deal to fund a minimum wage of up to […]

Does Amazon’s embrace of the Fight for $15 mean Congress should do the same? New Jersey Rep. Donald Norcross recently made that case in these pages, arguing that the retail giant’s embrace of a $15 minimum wage meant other businesses could afford it as well. But Norcross’ argument confuses a voluntary raise with an involuntary mandate: One boosts paychecks; the other could leave employees without any pay at all. Today, […]

Voters in Missouri and Arkansas will head to the polls this November to vote on whether to raise the minimum wage in those states. The ballot measures are the handiwork of seemingly grassroots organizations "Arkansas for a Fair Wage" and "Raise Up Missouri." However, a closer look reveals that each initiative's main supporters aren't local residents, but rather deep-pocketed national labor unions and special interest groups. Consider […]

Gov. Andrew Cuomo went into his gubernatorial primary against Cynthia Nixon on Thursday with statewide polls giving him a nearly 40-point advantage. Yet Cuomo’s nervous habit of desperately trying to appease his left flank continued right through the primary — and shows no sign of slowing down as the governor mulls a presidential run. But Cuomo shouldn’t let the election pass without learning a lesson about his […]

Call it the wage increase that wasn’t. In June, 10 percent of registered D.C. voters supported Initiative 77, a ballot measure to raise the base wage for tipped employees by 200 percent. Proponents of the measure portrayed this low-turnout win as a meaningful one. Yet a survey of voters who supported the idea shows that a majority wrongly thought they were supporting a minimum-wage increase to $15 — […]