New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani forcefully defended his call for a $30 minimum wage during the final debate of the race Wednesday night, warning that under the status quo, the expensive metropolis is at growing risk of becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”
The inability of many New Yorkers to make a livable wage in the city, Mamdani said, “is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut, because they can’t afford to live in New York City.”
Under Mamdani’s proposal, which would have to be approved by lawmakers, New York City’s wage floor would rise incrementally before reaching $30 an hour by 2030. The minimum wage would then be tied to either cost-of-living increases or worker productivity jumps.
Yeah. It is why I very much side eye the people who feel the need to talk about how the most pointless and milquetoast of things are “better than nothing”.
The reality is that people only care so much for any given set of indignities. And most people are perfectly happy to equate “I marched with Dr King” and “I only watched a little bit of Twitch during the boycott”