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.

Fast food also has a uniquely difficult business structure for workers to achieve better wages and working conditions.

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.

The free market hasn't done a very good job "figuring out" how to pay workers enough. If it was solely up to the market, the people with the least power would be paid pennies ... or less.

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

The vast majority (over 80 percent) of fast-food and similar low wage service jobs (<$9.24/hr) are held by adults. A quarter are adults over 40. Another quarter are moms raising kids.