$15 an hour for fast food workers? Starting salary for the FDNY is just over $18 an hour. Heck the Winston-Salem fire department starts you out just over $17 an hour.
I think that's a bit of a straw man. Just for clarification's sake: aren't firefighters municipal workers? It would seem that we're talking about different classifications of labor in that case.
I know administrative assistants who make $80k - what exactly does gross under or over compensation add to this argument?
The fact is that the minimum wage is far too low. Like any good negotiation, you start high.
I worked for a grocery store for two years out of college, one that offered me a $11/hr starting salary, along with quarterly raises of up to $1/hour, and the option to buy in to what is still the best health insurance of my life. After two years, I was making $16/hour with full benefits and to this day, I have never had a job that has compensated me that well. Granted, I'm a graduate student and will be for some time, but I wasn't then. During that time, I also held the title of Program Assistant at two non profits, and was compensated less and without benefits. Living in New York at the time, I paid $700/mo. in rent (which is actually really cheap), ~$100/mo. in transportation, and ~$50 in utilities.
In a lot of ways, I was lucky. I have a college education from an elite school and likely was started a dollar higher than most workers at my store as a result. Furthermore, being white and educated in a workplace that privileged this, likely allowed me to make max quarterly raises versus a lot of my lower income peers.
All workers are underpaid, but low wage workers lack both opportunities for upward mobility and often are positionally stuck in minimum wage jobs with added financial burdens. A poster wrote about working in the Banana Republic, but both that poster and myself had greater opportunities to fall back on. We moved on. Most low wage workers don't have these opportunities.
Perhaps a $15/hr. minimum wage is problematic, but it's a start of a conversation that desperately needs to be had, especially considering the divergent trajectories experienced by low wage workers in this country. Making $15/hr for the rest of your life certainly changes the terms of this conversation, IMO. If anything, then it helps poor people stay a bit better off in an increasingly bleak economy.
And fuck bootstraps.