Generation Z workers push for $15 minimum wage as Congress, Biden debate pay for all Americans

For months, Cris Cardona, 21, has fed his family from the garden he started in his backyard. Harvests of black-eyed peas, arugula, okra, radishes and a cornucopia of other vegetables are what sustains Cardona, who aspires to one day have a career running a community food bank for his neighborhood in Orlando, Florida. To reach that goal, Cardona saves a small amount of the wages he earns at his job as a manager at McDonald’s to help cover the cost of the agricultural science degree he eventually hopes to earn.

Cardona said he mostly works with elderly people, single mothers and young people trying to get by.

“They don’t work there because they want to, they do it because they have to,” said Cardona, who organizes car caravan rallies outside fast-food restaurants with the workers' rights group Fight for $15, and has lobbied state lawmakers to continue including teens in minimum wage increases.

A growing number of Generation Z workers like Cardona are advocating for federal lawmakers to increase the minimum wage to $15 amid a national debate over whether higher pay would be good for all workers.

President Joe Biden has called on lawmakers to pass a $15 minimum wage, arguing the increase would benefit workers as a whole. Critics have pushed back, pointing to warnings that hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans could lose work if employers have to increase pay. They’ve said teenagers and young adults, especially those from marginalized communities, would likely be among those who would find themselves out of work.

Roughly 43% of workers who receive minimum wage or less are under 25 years of age and roughly 17% are teenagers. Many say they need higher wages to pay for a growing list of adult-like expenses, such as car payments, rent, tuition and, in many cases, helping their parents with basic living costs.

“I ended up just being the emergency fund,” says 19-year-old Fiona Joseph, who started paying rent and utility bills for her family during the pandemic. Her mom, a nurse at a veterans' home, and her dad, who manages a security company, both got hit with hours reductions caused by pandemic safety measures at their workplaces.

Joseph started working at age 16 earning what was then the New Jersey minimum wage of $8 per hour. When the state increased its minimum wage to $10 per hour in 2018, Joseph said she and other over-scheduled high schoolers felt immediate benefits.

“I didn’t have to work 25 hours a week in order to pay the electricity bill,” she said.

Under Biden’s plan, the federal minimum wage would rise to $15 per hour by 2025 under his proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. If Congress supports the measure, 31% of Black workers and 26% of Latinx workers would get a raise like Joseph, who is Black and Haitian American.

In January, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Biden’s push to increase the minimum wage revealed a contempt for Black teenagers, whom Paul argued would be the first group to lose jobs from wage-related job reductions.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a widely cited report Monday estimating 1.4 million workers, or less than 1% of all employed Americans, would lose their jobs under Biden’s minimum wage proposal. Roughly 17 million workers, however, would get a pay bump.

“Higher wages would increase the cost to employers of producing goods and services,” the CBO said. “Employers would pass some of those increased costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices, and those higher prices, in turn, would lead consumers to purchase fewer goods and services. Employers would consequently produce fewer goods and services, and as a result, they would tend to reduce their employment of workers at all wage levels.”

Many Republican and Democratic lawmakers, including Biden, have conceded that it will be difficult to gain enough support for Congress to pass a $15 minimum wage anytime soon. Last week, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted against increasing the federal minimum wage during the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis.

But many experts said the CBO’s job loss estimates aren’t nearly definitive enough, and any warnings that young people will be hurt by a higher minimum wage ignore the reality that teenagers and young adults also want to earn more money to cover everyday expenses.

“The argument that one shouldn’t move forward with this at all because of one group, that’s misleading,” said Sophie Collyer, director of Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy in New York City.

Collyer said she’s seen firsthand how young people in New York City benefited when the minimum wage increased to $15 in late 2018. New York is one of 45 cities and localities in the country that have higher minimum wages than state minimums. Across the country, 28 states have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.

“They’re not competing with adults for those jobs,” said Collyer of students who are now earning higher wages.

Collyer also noted that the extent to which job losses result from wage increases has always been actively debated by economists. Other experts note that cost increases consumer may see on price tags rise very little compared to overall inflation.

“It’s definitely not definitive that there would be job losses in the short-term," Collyer said.

When it comes to wage increases, young workers said lawmakers should listen to them instead of assuming they know what is best for them.

“It infuriates me to be used as a scapegoat,” said Joseph, whose most recent job was at a Chipotle in Washington, D.C., where she’s currently a sophomore at George Washington University.

When New Jersey increased its minimum wage to $10 per hour in 2018, Joseph, who was working at an AMC movie theater, felt the benefits as a high school student helping her parents.

After she moved to Washington for college, her wages increased from $10 per hour to $14 per hour.

“I remember when I saw my first new paycheck, I couldn’t believe it,” Joseph said. “The difference was shocking. It’s still so strange. In a way, I felt privileged compared to New Jersey.”

Efforts to increase state minimum wages have also stirred debate over whether young workers see disproportionate layoffs. Some states have even sought to block teenagers from benefiting from higher wages.

In Florida, voters decided in November to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 by September 30th, 2026. But young people might not benefit from the change. Last month, state senators introduced legislation that would exclude teens and recently incarcerated people from seeing wage increases as part of Amendment 2.

“I think it is blatantly racist,” said Cardona, the McDonald’s manager from Orlando, noting that most formerly incarcerated people are Black because of systemic racism that results in Black Americans being sentenced at tougher rates than white Americans for the same crimes, among other factors.

Similar legislation was introduced in 2018 in New Jersey when lawmakers first voted to schedule a minimum wage increase calendar. Ultimately, state lawmakers opted not to exclude young workers from earning the $15 minimum wage, in part due to teenagers rallying against the proposal.

Joseph said she was infuriated at the idea that workers like her shouldn’t earn the same as adults doing the same labor. There were many work shifts where she had to take on tasks reserved only for adults, according to child labor laws, like using certain machinery and deescalating emergency situations.

“It makes no sense to me, because it devalues teen work,” she said. “It seems like a cheap excuse, to be honest.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Minimum wage: $15 pay law could make a difference for Gen Z workers