59 PERCENT BACK $15 MINIMUM WAGE

“ ‘There’s still a lot of pro-labor, pro-worker sentiment,” said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University who has written about populism and popular movements. “Inequality is a big issue nowadays. The Fight for $15 has become the way that civil rights was in the early ’60s — it’s an issue you can’t avoid. For politicians — or at least Democratic politicians — you want to be on the right side.’

“Fifty-nine percent of Americans, including 84 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents, support a $15 minimum wage, according to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research group. Just 32 percent of Republicans do.”

Steven Greenhouse, “How the $15 Minimum Wage Went from Laughable to Viable,” The New York Times, April 1, 2016. Steven Greenhouse, a visiting researcher at the Russell Sage Foundation, is a former labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times and the author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.