Opinion: The $30/hour McDonald’s job isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds

Ten summers ago, a 23-year-old Burger King employee from Rochester caught the attention of a crowded Buffalo hall at the first of four meetings of a special State Wage Board, describing life on the then-$8.75 hourly statewide minimum wage.

 “We are poor,” Crescenzo Scipione testified on behalf of fellow burger flippers and fry cooks, some holding “Fight for 15” signs. “And we are all tired of being poor.”

The groundswell paid off – the state-set minimum wage will be $17/hour come January. But given the march of inflation, it remains too little to live on. James Parrott, senior advisor and senior fellow at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, said that if legislators had pegged the base wage rate to the annual inflation rate and worker productivity back when the state’s minimum wage was first set in 1960 at $1/hour, it would now exceed $34/hour. 

That decades-long lag is unfortunate, especially for the livelihoods and educational prospects of grocery cashiers, security guards, delivery workers and others who make up the vast low-paid workforce. So highly lionized during the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s minimum wage workers still struggle to pay the rent. Typically, they’re not college students living at home under a parent’s roof in summer. Rather, they’re single or married breadwinners in their early 20s to early 30s. 

Gwendalyn Mae, a 27-year-old security guard for a pharmacy chain and a community college graduate, shrugged when asked about her living expenses – which she said include food and clothing for her two kids, half the $2,000 rent for a flat she shares with her partner in a house in the Bronx, a $132 monthly transit pass and more. “Everything,” she said, noting she earns $20/hour, so clearly insufficient for getting by, much less ahead, even with the help of her mom. Her dream is to become a police officer or a registered nurse.

“If you’re making $20 an hour in New York City, you’re not remotely getting by,” said Paul Sonn, state policy program director of the National Employment Law Project. 

While Mae and several workers we talked with brightened at the mention of Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s promise of a $30 minimum wage by 2030, business owners simply shook their heads at the thought of this, calling it a bridge too far. “It would put us out of business,” unless, that is, the next mayor helped restaurateurs pay for it, perhaps with special relief from the sales tax, said Dudley Stewart, co-owner of The Queensboro, a popular Jackson Heights restaurant. 

Mamdani’s promise may in fact be more possible than many think because local decision-making leeway, or home rule, is more readily granted to cities than back in 1964, the year a city minimum wage law sponsored by Councilman-at-large Paul O’Dwyer of Manhattan and Mayor Robert Wagner was struck down by the courts. That case, Wholesale Laundry Board of Trade v. City of NY, resulted in a ruling in state appellate court that cities lacked the authority to set their own wage floors. The city’s appeal to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, went nowhere.

But that was then, and things have changed. “The line of reasoning that Wholesale Laundry was based on has arguably fallen apart, as it doesn’t grapple with the evolution of home rule since that time,” said Columbia law professor Dennis Fan. “Big picture: That period of time, more than 60 years ago, was different.”

Something else is different: today’s research, and recent experience in cities around the country, suggests that raising the base pay for low-wage workers boosts consumer spending by putting more money into the pockets of working people. The overall effect is to offset the strain on Main Street payrolls, and improve rather than put a drag on the local economy. And higher pay can increase the pool of applicants for hands-on workers, including those from adjacent areas with lower minimums, as well as reduce turnover.

When the breakthrough state hearings of 10 summers ago wrapped up, even the business representative on the panel of three convened by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo lent his name to the board’s recommendation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for employees of fast-food franchises statewide. The panel noted in its final report that 60% of minimum wage workers in the state were receiving some form of means-tested government aid, costing taxpayers $903 million a year, while the fast-food industry – one of the state’s largest employers of low-paid workers – was thriving. The top 14 publicly traded fast food chains made a total profit of $9.3 billion, the board noted, while the industry’s average CEO drew $23.8 million in annual compensation. More to the point, the panel saw little threat that a higher minimum wage would result in layoffs or higher prices, something the New York Restaurant Association and other industry representatives had contended. 

In the end, the minimum wage for fast-food employees was elevated to $15/hour as of Dec. 31, 2018, and it became the state minimum salary across all sectors as of July 1, 2021.

Since then, the state’s wage floor has gone up twice. One impetus was legislation pushed by the 2022 “Raise Up the Wage” bill, sponsored by state Sen. Jessica Ramos of Queens; if it had become law, it would have lifted the minimum wage to $19.25 by 2025. It failed to pass, but it seemed to open a path that led Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign a measure in May 2023 that lifted the wage rate to $16.50/hour downstate and $16/hour upstate, with both set to rise by 50 cents in January. Starting in 2027, under Hochul’s law, the minimum wage increase will be indexed to the annual inflation rate (capped at 3%).

Mamdani’s promise to lift the city’s wage floor to $30 if elected mayor reflects, in part, public recognition that low-wage workers regularly juggle two or even three jobs and often must defer or drop out of post-secondary education. Meanwhile, according to Parrott, the share of income going to the richest 1% of city residents has risen nearly every year since 1980, a climb that testifies to the city’s class chasm. The City Council responded in July for today’s platoons of Instacart and other app-based food delivery workers, approving a $21.44/hour minimum pay for them on top of their tips, to match the rate of restaurant-based delivery workers.

Nearly 18% of working people in the city – about 765,000 New Yorkers – have a household income hovering barely above the poverty line, according to Parrott, and 25% of city households receive food stamps, though most of those households are supported by at least one working person. A minimum wage hike is a kind of safety net, but unlike replacing the funds that the Republican Party’s “big, beautiful bill” will exact from housing, food stamps, and Medicaid, it requires no state budgetary appropriation.

The concern that raising the minimum pay would force businesses to close, lay people off or raise prices is not particularly well-supported by recent experience or research literature. One of the most extensive studies of its kind, completed at the end of 2024 by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, found no net shedding of positions in the fast-food industry in California or New York as a result of both states having instituted, respectively, a $20/hour and $15/hour minimum for that sector. Instead, the study found positive employment outcomes.

Dozens of other cities and counties around the country allow minimum wages to be set by individual cities. Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Denver, Washington, D.C. and Chicago have higher wage floors than New York state allows its own cities. Seattle’s is the most generous, at $20.76/hour. In these blue cities and others, a focus on wages in individual sectors by advocates and unions has helped inspire wage hikes covering additional sectors.

Would the courts allow New York City, or other cities in the state, to similarly set its own minimum wage?  

Fan, the Columbia law professor, noted that 1964’s Wholesale Laundry decision could be ripe for reinterpretation because the scope of home rule has become more expansive since then. The De Blasio administration, for instance, posted 25-mile-per-hour speed limits under its Vision Zero program – lower than the speeds governing rural and suburban roads under state regulation, Fan noted. The recent wage hike for app-based delivery workers represents another step around the state’s inherent powers of preemption of home rule.

If the question of whether a locality can set its own wage floor reaches the state’s courts in a new mayoral administration, then the anonymous workforce that grills the burgers, keeps watch in ATM lobbies or tends to the frail and homebound, could finally prevail, helping to ease the harsh inequalities of life in the big city.