GJ

I think some of it can be described pretty well through the 15 Now campaign.

In 2013, Socialist Alternative ran Ty Moore for city council in a different district. This was the same year that we got Kshama Sawant elected in Seattle. Throughout the course of the campaign in Seattle, the fifteen-dollar minimum wage became the key issue. Ultimately, we launched 15 Now and won in Seattle in 2014. But we raised the demand in Minneapolis as well. The only press we really got was the city council saying that Ty Moore didn’t really know what he was running for because it was illegal for the city to raise the minimum wage, that it was ridiculous and too high.

Yet at the same time, there was this wave of progressive-looking Democrats who were elected across the country. Our mayor, Betsy Hodges, was basically elected on a racial and economic equity agenda. But she was also very clear, from the beginning, that a minimum-wage increase would not happen under her administration.

After Jamar Clark was murdered in North Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, the main things in Minneapolis politics really were questions of how we deal with racial inequity in the city. There are seventeen Fortune 500 companies in Minneapolis — it’s among the highest in any major city in the country. And yet there’s some of the worst racial equity gaps in the country.

There is clearly enough wealth to go around, but there was still this intransigence to 15. The city council, up until very recently, continued to say that it was illegal to raise the minimum wage, that fifteen dollars was too high, and it was only really under the pressure of a movement that they were forced to actually pass something.

There was a real disconnect between what aspirations and hopes had been tied to a more progressive city council in 2013 and what developed politically. It set the stage for movements to play an enormous, and even outsized role, compared to what they had in the past in the city.

This year, we’ve had all of these left challengers who are seeing themselves in the role of Bernie Sanders, in some ways, and we’ve seen the fifteen-dollar demand become one of the main issues around whether or not people would get the Democratic Party endorsement. I think a lot of it too is based around the election of Trump and this debate on how to really fight back against a right-wing agenda.