The fight for $15 is officially over.

On Wednesday, the minimum wage in D.C. jumps by a buck to $15 an hour, capping off a four-year phased pay hike that  puts the city alongside places like New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It also represents a significant leap in what the city’s lowest-wage workers can legally be paid; less than a decade ago, D.C.’s minimum wage was $8.25, just a dollar over the federal minimum.

The story of how D.C. got to $15 is one of fights over growth and inequality, savvy political maneuvering, and a national campaign that quickly notched victories in some of the country’s biggest cities. But it’s also one of work left to be done: while $15 an hour means additional earnings for many low-wage workers in D.C., advocates say it’s still barely enough to survive on in most cities.

“It’s exciting for us to be hitting this $15 goal,” says Elizabeth Falcon, director of D.C. Jobs With Justice. “But $15 is still far from living wage in D.C.”

Seven Years In The Making

The push to increase the minimum wage in D.C. started in 2013 with a bill that would have required big-box retailers like Walmart, Home Depot and Best Buy to pay employees a “living wage” of $11.75 an hour. Advocates said it was a simple means of economic equity: the retailers could afford to pay the higher wage, and it would benefit workers in a city that had started getting more expensive. But critics worried it would be a job-killer, especially as D.C. officials pushed to attract national chains to the city.

The bill ultimately passed, but threats by Walmart to back out of plans to build three new stores in the city prompted then-mayor Vincent Gray to veto the measure — a veto the D.C. Council narrowly sustained.

Despite the loss, lawmakers pushed forward with a number of bills to increase the city’s minimum wage, then $8.25 an hour. And they ultimately succeeded toward the end of 2013, with a bill approving a phased increase to $11.50 an hour by 2016. And D.C. wasn’t alone — the measure was passed as part of a regional compromise in which Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland also agreed to the pay hike as a means to prevent businesses from jumping across state lines to get cheaper labor.

But it wasn’t long before advocates were pushing for more. By late 2014, the Restaurant Opportunities Center United — a New York-based group that advocates for servers and other restaurant workers —said it would ask D.C. voters to approve a ballot measure increasing the city’s minimum wage to $15. (A national campaign for $15 kicked off in New York City in 2012.) That prompted a fierce legal battle waged by the D.C. Chamber of Commerce, which fought to keep the measure off the 2016 ballot, saying that if it passed it would chase businesses to the surrounding suburbs.

At the outset, Mayor Muriel Bowser was deeply skeptical of the ballot initiative. But Bowser surprised almost everyone when she said in a 2016 speech that she was all in with the fight for $15. Her bill sailed through the Council, earning her plaudits from President Obama and setting the city toward the milestone it hit today.

“The reason she came out in support of $15 was because we had collected 60,000 signatures [for the ballot initiative] and the train had left the station. Rather than seeming like she had been run over, she saw the writing on the wall. Like a good leader, she followed where her people were going,” says Delvone Michael, who at the time was the director of D.C. Working Families.

The Third Rail: The Tipped Wage

But there was something else that fueled Bowser’s quick conversion on the issue, adds Delvone: “The biggest thing was she realized that the ballot initiative would have eliminated the tipped credit.”

He is referring to the tipped wage paid to restaurant servers, parking lots attendants, salon employees, and other workers who collect tips. The law requires that their employers pay them a sub-minimum wage — $2.77 at the time of the 2016 bill — and the employees take tips on top of that. If those tips don’t get the worker up to the prevailing minimum wage, the employer has to make up the difference.

For the last decade, the tipped wage has been the third-rail of minimum wage fights. Advocates have long wanted to do away with it, and require restaurants and parking lots and nail salons to just pay their workers the minimum wage directly (that is the case in seven states already). But the tipped wage has been fiercely defended by bar and restaurant owners (and some staff), who say it helps businesses stay afloat and lets workers make even more than the minimum wage through the tips they can collect.

The original minimum wage ballot initiative would have eliminated the tipped wage. The bill Bowser introduced and the Council ultimately passed left it in place, though it did gradually adjust upwards from from $2.77 then to $5 on Wednesday.

That, though, did not settle the debate. In 2018, D.C. voters approved Initiative 77, a ballot measure that phased out the tipped wage by 2025. But four months later, under immense pressure from restaurant groups and organized servers and bartenders, the Council overturned the initiative.

The Impact Of $15

Maria Vásquez cleans a building close to Union Station, and the 59-year-old says she feels fortunate that her union contract gets her $16.10 an hour. But even with that, she says she struggles to make ends meet — and can’t imagine what it would be like not to make at least $15.

“The rent is too high, and the money just doesn’t cut it,” she says.

Advocates say that’s the conundrum they face: even though $15 an hour is a new milestone, the $30,000 it translates to on an annual basis isn’t nearly enough to live in D.C.

“Clearly $15 an hour does not allow one person to live in D.C. in the rental market,” says Falcon. A 2019 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that a person would have to make at least $32 an hour to afford the rent on a two-bedroom home.

Still, Falcon says hitting $15 is important for a city that has only gotten more expensive since the 2016 bill was passed — and where economic inequality is high.

“That D.C. is hitting this national baseline is important,” she says. “And it’s also important that D.C.’s wage is now pegged to inflation. Even though we’re hitting $15, the minimum wage will continue to go up. So the value of a minimum wage job won’t fall.”

Of course, there’s still plenty of debate about whether increasing the minimum wages is good or bad public policy. On the one hand, advocates argue it gives workers more money that they can then spend themselves, spurring the economy. But critics say it leads businesses to cut employees or hours, and leads to price increases that impact all consumers. (The D.C. Chamber of Commerce, which has traditionally opposed wage hikes, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

In 2017, researchers in the office of D.C.’s Chief Financial Officer tried to estimate how a $15 wage floor would impact the city. They concluded that 61,000 D.C. residents could benefit from the higher wage, taking in $5,100 more a year. (Another city-commissioned analysis said Black, Hispanic, and female workers would most benefit from the wage increase.) Still, they estimated that consumer prices would go up 0.2% and business profits would decrease 2.3%. Additionally, job losses could approach 3.4% by 2026 — largely because workers from neighboring Maryland and Virginia would be enticed to compete for jobs in the city.

Businesses with more than 51 employees in Montgomery County will hit $15 next year, but smaller business will move up that wage more slowly. And in the rest of Maryland, $15 an hour will come in 2026. That’s the same schedule for Virginia, which will see a first wage increase from the current $7.25 to $9.50 next May. (Business groups have also used the economic fallout from the pandemic to call for delays on wage hikes, both locally and around the country.)

Advocates say there isn’t yet a sequel to “Fight for $15,” but rather they have turned their attention to other pressing matters: affordable housing, health care, and pandemic-related concerns like rent relief or forgiveness. There’s also broader discussions around how to best support local businesses that are hammered by high rents. And on Wednesday, another progressive milestone will be reached: D.C.’s new paid family leave program takes effect.

But Delvone Michael doesn’t foreclose on another push for higher wages.

“This would have been unthinkable five years ago, that the country would see $15 as a reasonable wage,” he says. “If people have come to the conclusion that $15 is acceptable, truly it’s not enough.”