NY panel recommends $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers

The labor protest movement that fast-food workers in New York City set off four years ago has led to higher wages for workers all over the country. On Wednesday, it finally paid off for the people who started it.

A panel appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo recommended Wednesday that the minimum wage be raised for employees of fast-food chain restaurants throughout the state to $15 an hour. Wages would first be raised in New York City and then the rest of the state.

The $15 wage would represent a raise of more than 70 percent for workers earning the state’s current minimum wage of $8.75 an hour. Advocates for low-wage workers said they believed that the mandate would quickly spur pay raises for employees in other industries across the state.

“Chalk one up for the 99-percenters,” said Bill Lipton, director of the Working Families Party in New York, which has campaigned for the $15 minimum wage. “There’s clearly a new standard for the minimum wage, and it’s actually a living wage for the first time in many, many decades.”

The decision comes on the heels of similar increases in minimum wages in other cities, including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to raise the county’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, matching a move the Los Angeles City Council made in June.

But a different political terrain in New York forced Cuomo to take a different route.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has demanded a higher minimum wage in New York City to account for its higher cost of living. But neither he nor the City Council has the power to set wages citywide.

When state lawmakers in Albany balked at the idea, Cuomo convened a board to look at wages in the fast-food industry, which is one of the biggest employers of low-wage workers in the state, with about 180,000 employees. The acting state commissioner of labor, Mario Musolino, can issue an order accepting, rejecting or modifying the board’s recommendations.

The wage board said the increase in the minimum wage to $15 should come by 2018 in New York City and by 2021 in the rest of the state.

After hearing testimony from dozens of fast-food workers who complained they could not support themselves or their families on the low pay offered by big chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s, the board members decided the state should mandate that fast-food chains pay more. Advocates often pointed to the huge profits those companies reaped and the giant pay packages they gave to their top executives.

The restaurant industry has chafed at being chosen. “We continue to say that we think it’s unfair that they singled out a single segment of our industry,” said Melissa Fleischut, the executive director of the New York State Restaurant Association.

McDonald’s, a multinational corporation that paid its chief executive more than $7.5 million last year, said in April that it would raise the minimum wage it pays its workers to $9.90 by July 1 and to more than $10 next year.

But workers in New York City who have staged protests at airports, in Times Square and on the steps of City Hall have argued that even $10.10 is not a living wage in New York.

This story was originally published July 22, 2015 at 5:38 PM with the headline "NY panel recommends $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers."