The article
The Floor
1On November 29, 2012, about 200 fast-food workers in New York City walked off the job. They worked at McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and other chains, and many of them earned little more than the state’s minimum wage, which was then $7.25 an hour. They made two demands: pay of $15 an hour, and the right to form a union. Many people thought the demand was impossible. Fifteen dollars was more than twice the minimum. Less than four years later, it was the law in New York. But the fight over a minimum wage in New York did not begin in 2012. It began almost a hundred years earlier.
2A minimum wage is the lowest pay an employer is allowed by law to pay a worker for an hour of work. People often call it a floor: pay can go up from there, but not below it. In the early 1900s, there was no floor. Employers paid whatever workers would accept, and many workers, especially women and children in laundries, shops, and garment factories, were paid too little to live on.
3One New Yorker who set out to change that was Frances Perkins. In 1911, she watched from the street as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory near Washington Square burned, and 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, died. She spent the rest of her life working for laws to protect workers. When Franklin Roosevelt became governor of New York, he put her in charge of the state’s labor department. In 1933, New York passed a minimum wage law for women and children. Perkins had helped write it.
4The law did not last. A laundry manager in Brooklyn, Joseph Tipaldo, paid the women who worked for him $10 a week, less than the law required. When the state took him to court, he argued that the law itself was against the Constitution. On June 1, 1936, the United States Supreme Court agreed with him, by a vote of five to four. The majority said that a minimum wage law interfered with the freedom of an employer and a worker to agree on whatever pay they chose.
5The decision was unpopular, even with many people who usually sided with business. President Roosevelt said it left a “no-man’s-land” where no government, state or federal, could act. That November, Roosevelt was reelected in one of the largest landslides in American history, winning 523 electoral votes to his opponent’s 8.
6Then the Court changed its mind. Elsie Parrish was a chambermaid who cleaned rooms in a hotel in Wenatchee, Washington. Her state had a minimum wage law for women, and her employer had paid her less. On March 29, 1937, in a case called West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, again by five to four. One justice had changed sides. A state could set a minimum wage after all.
7The door was now open for a national law. Frances Perkins, by then Secretary of Labor in Washington, had kept drafts of such a law in her desk drawer. On June 25, 1938, President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. It set the first national minimum wage, 25 cents an hour. It limited the workweek to 44 hours, dropping later to 40, with extra pay for overtime, and it banned the worst kinds of child labor. But it covered only about one worker in five. Farmworkers and household workers, such as maids and cooks, were left out.
8The national minimum wage is a floor for the whole country, and a state can set its own floor higher. After the 2012 strike, fast-food workers kept striking and marching, and they were joined by workers in other cities. In 2015, a state board recommended $15 an hour for fast-food workers in New York. On April 4, 2016, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a law raising the minimum wage for nearly all workers in the state, step by step. Large employers in New York City had to pay $15 by the end of 2018, and the rest of the state followed on a slower schedule.
9Today, in 2026, the minimum wage is $17 an hour in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, and $16 in the rest of the state. Starting in 2027, it will rise each year with the cost of living. The national minimum wage, meanwhile, has been $7.25 since 2009. Every raise in New York’s history has been argued over. Business owners have warned that a higher minimum wage forces employers to raise prices or hire fewer people. Supporters answer that no one who works full time should be too poor to pay the rent. Economists still disagree about how much each side is right. What is not in doubt is that the floor did not build itself. It was built by people like Frances Perkins, Elsie Parrish, and the workers who walked out in 2012.