Congress can barely name a post office without partisan rancor, so it’s light years away from taking any meaningful action on income inequality. That’s why hope has shifted to states and cities. Seattle led the way in June with a successful drive to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. But further down the Pacific Coast, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a coalition of labor and community groups has put together a much more ambitious, comprehensive, and muscular plan to raise the minimum wage—one that doesn’t stop at the limits of any single city. Over time they want to create a regional living wage across eight counties, lifting the fortunes of the working poor.

Two measures will appear before voters this November in Oakland and in San Francisco, where a ballot initiative to raise wages to $15 an hour by 2018 for all workers in the city qualified Tuesday. Similar measures will appear in the next two years in Berkeley and Richmond. And if they succeed, more will follow, as far north as Sonoma and Napa and as far south as San Mateo. Opponents of the higher minimum wage in Seattle argued that it would drive businesses to lower-wage pastures. If California’s region-wide gambit works, businesses will have nowhere to flee if they want to tap into the wealthy customer base in northern California. They’ll simply have to treat their workers well.

The movement is led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local 1021, but the benefits would be enjoyed by all workers in the covered area. They have joined with statewide organizing groups like the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, as well as different community, faith and labor groups in each city. The San Francisco group is called the Coalition for a Fair Economy; in Oakland, it’s Lift Up Oakland.

Organizers have approached the minimum wage as a rare economic justice wedge issue, allowing for a boldness not typically seen in modern labor fights. Like Seattle, they want to raise it to $15 an hour. But they have also added several new core principles: Indexing the minimum wage to the cost of living, rejecting any exemptions or carve-outs for categories of workers, protecting tipped workers from having their tips taken by their employer, and including paid sick days. Combined, this would create the most full-service set of benefits for low-wage workers in the nation.

In San Francisco, SEIU 1021’s strategy worked perfectly. The city already has laws for paid sick days and protecting workers’ tips, making it a natural starting point. In April, the Coalition for a Fair Economy, led by SEIU 1021, released its ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2017, with cost of living adjustments thereafter. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce immediately denounced it as outrageous. But minimum wage measures are popular—the last one in San Francisco in 2003 passed with well over 60 percent of the vote. So the threat of the ballot measure forced the Chamber and Mayor Ed Lee into negotiations with the coalition. Eventually the two sides reached a consensus, endorsing a new ballot measure that delayed the move to $15 until 2018, while retaining every other aspect. It will head to voters for approval in November.