Fast Food Minimum Wage

I am glad that the Fight for $15 in fast food has forced the hand on Andrew Cuomo to raise the wages of those workers to $15 by 2021. That’s a win. But it’s totally ridiculous that it is industry-based as opposed to a general minimum wage. I fear the upshot of this will be to create divisions among workers, and perhaps at the same time, to start turning already fractured minimum wage law (national, state, city) into something even more fractured if it turns on industry lines. While one hopes this leads to demands from all workers for $15 an hour, we don’t want to have to do this industry by industry. This is a problem created by Cuomo, who just set a precedent for industry-wide minimum wage differentials. I don’t like that one bit.