In November 2012, New York City fast-food workers walked off their jobs, demanding a $15 minimum wage and union rights. Since then, the struggle for higher wages has become one of the most successful workers’ movements in recent memory, impacting 86 states, cities, and counties, pressuring some of the world’s largest corporations to raise their pay scales, and transforming public opinion.

These massive wins have amounted to an average of $5,300 in additional annual income per worker. The impact is particularly significant for workers of color. State minimum wage increases boosted the earnings of Black workers by $5,100 annually on average, and local minimum wage increases raised their earnings by $7,300.

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the worker-of-color-led Fight for $15. The Rockefeller Foundation’s grantee, the National Employment Law Project (NELP), has published a new report detailing the campaign’s impacts on the racial wealth gap and on states that are leading the way to create better financial stability for workers.

I sat down with NELP’s Senior Researcher and Policy Analyst, Yannet Lathrop, to learn what has worked and what’s next for the movement:

Q: Through this movement, are there any trends about which states have reduced the racial wealth gap? What is the landscape in RF’s priority states: Florida, Alabama, Missouri, and New Mexico?

A: We did not estimate the movement’s equity impacts by state. But we found that between 2013 and 2019, the Black-white wealth gap decreased by 40.3 percentage points in states that raised their minimum wages, and the Latinx-white wealth gap decreased by 29.4 percentage points. In states that adopted minimum wages of $15 or more, the racial wealth gap decreased faster: the Black-white wealth gap narrowed by 54.3 percentage points, and the Latinx-white wealth gap by 48.0 percentage points. Florida, Missouri, and New Mexico are among the states that adopted higher wages during the period analyzed; while Alabama neglected to raise its wage floor and adopted a minimum wage preemption law to invalidate Birmingham’s adoption of a local wage floor in 2016. Recently, SEIU—which has backed the Fight for $15—announced a new initiative to unionize workers in the South. Hopefully, this new effort will mean higher wages for underpaid workers in the region and, with time, a narrowing of the racial wealth gap.

Read the full article about racial wealth gap by Rachel Isacoff at The Rockefeller Foundation.