Annual earnings in the fast-food industry are well below the income needed for self-sufficiency, and fast-food industry jobs are also much less likely than other jobs to provide health benefits.

The fast-food industry is notorious for employing millions of Americans at poverty wages.

Most fast-food workers can't easily join a union, because they don't work directly for their parent company, such as McDonald's or Subway. Instead, they work for individual franchise owners, ensuring that each individual fast-food outlet would have to organize and win union recognition separately. So there's not one central employer to bargain with, as in a traditional union campaign.

When families can afford the basics, they can reinvest in their communities, and higher wages means a broader consumer base for businesses.

Businesses generally deal with minimum wage increases by finding efficiencies in their business practices or slightly increasing prices if they have to, not cutting jobs. Of course: because they need staff to make their businesses run!

The minimum wage isn't earned only by people working at fast food restaurants and in service industry work - the average income for positions like nursing assistants, preschool teachers and paramedics are all under $15.

Income inequality and wage stagnation finally took their place among the principal moral issues of our time.