It’s not just an affordability crisis. While inflation has been a national story for years and President Trump’s sporadic tariffs and war against Iran have only made matters worse, there’s another big stress on household budgets: Wages aren’t keeping up with rising costs.
Advocates and think tanks aligned with progressives are pushing Democrats to focus not only on affordability but on increasing worker pay, as well. The One Fair Wage campaign has introduced bills to increase the minimum wage around the country, to varying success. An effort to hike the D.C. minimum wage to $25 an hour will not make the November ballot, but efforts in California and New York are ongoing. Allies in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced the Living Wage for All Act to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $25.
Saru Jayaraman, who leads One Fair Wage and also worked on the Fight for $15 campaign, said that her organization used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator to arrive at a minimum of $25: Nowhere in the country is the living wage lower than that figure, which shows just how much the economy has changed in the 14 years since this fight began.
“When we were running the Fight for $15, we were talking about maybe 15, maybe 20 percent of the population that was earning less than $15 an hour,” she said. “Now we’re talking about a $25 living wage for all, and literally 50 percent of working Americans earn less than $25 an hour. So it is no longer this fringe issue.”
The Living Wage for All Act would also eliminate the subminimum wage for youth, disabled, and tipped workers. Many more workers are staying in the service sector—as waiters, bartenders, baristas, and so on—than in the past, turning what was once seen as transitional work into a career. The fact that many tipped jobs pay a lower minimum wage means that those workers’ incomes can vary widely over the course of a week or month, making it harder to budget for the future.
“I make $8 before I get tipped,” said Sylvie Kling, a 26-year-old bartender who lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the nontipped minimum wage is $16.94. “I work 40 hours a week. I am thankful for the position that I have, and that’s crazy because things have only gotten more expensive since I started working in restaurants in 2018. It’s definitely not gotten any easier.”
But raising the federal minimum wage isn’t the only way to raise wages across the board. On Wednesday, the progressive nonprofit Economic Policy Institute released a new report showing how increasing union membership in the U.S. would boost incomes for everyone.
The unionization rate in the U.S. hit its historic high point, accounting for around 30 percent of private-sector workers, during the 1950s. Increasing union membership to that share today would raise wages for the median worker—all workers, not just union members—by $7,700 a year, shifting an estimated $1.2 trillion to workers annually overall. This would narrow the K-shaped pattern of economic growth we see now, where labor is earning a decreasing share of gross domestic product while CEOs get even richer. It would also decrease racial pay disparities affecting Black and Latino workers.
Of course, there are other benefits to unionization. Unions tend to score better benefits for workers, including health insurance, retirement savings, paid time off, and job protections. Such a high rate of unionization would fundamentally transform the economy, and politics more broadly.
“Strong unions also give workers a voice in shaping the fabric of their communities,” said Heidi Shierholz, the EPI’s president, on a press call. “High-union-density states invest more in public education. They deliver unemployment insurance benefits to a much greater share of jobless workers. They have all expanded Medicaid, and on and on and on. So, to the extent that strong unions are a driving force behind those things, tripling union density will create better outcomes on a huge array of factors, and unions protect democracy.”
Unions are more popular than ever, and membership ticked up slightly last year by almost half a million workers compared to 2024, to 11.2 percent, the first time it’s increased in 16 years. And a number of House candidates this year have won the Democratic nomination after stressing their own union experience, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City and a firefighter, Bob Brooks, in Pennsylvania. In past interviews, Valdez told me that being a member of the union helped her get involved in politics in the first place.
Of course, many right-to-work states, especially in the South, remain hostile to unions, as does the Trump administration. And for the past several decades, federal laws have eaten away at union power. The EPI pointed to three bipartisan bills active in Congress now—the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, and the Protecting America’s Workforce Act—that would reform labor law and make it easier for public- and private-sector workers to organize. Shierholz noted that a piece of the PRO Act, the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would speed up the timeline employers have to approve a first contract, was separated from the larger bill to be acted on more quickly. It passed the House with 20 Republicans joining the Democrats, and Missouri Republican Josh Hawley supports it in the Senate—a rare instance of bipartisan agreement, on an unlikely issue.
Without ambitious legislation, increasing union density to its midcentury peak would be tough if not impossible. But these efforts, as well as the proposals to increase the minimum wage, point to how conversations about high prices and affordability are drawing attention to broader, structural economic issues—and to the solutions that groups and politicians on the left have put out, in the hope that one day the Democrats will regain power and take them up.
