Actions like this are long overdue. Median wages have been stagnant for thirty years while prices have inflated naturally in the meantime and the costs of education and healthcare have skyrocketed. That minimum wage job in the early '80s was worth more in real purchasing power than a minimum wage job today. Even people who are employed full-time at these low-paying jobs can't make enough to support more than them-self or to grow off of & invest in education. That's why all the people saying "These people don't deserve $15 an hour." are completely missing the bigger picture.
In fact, most of these workers make so little that they qualify for state & federal aid programs, which only serves to cost the American taxpayer more. Just because we aren't paying slightly more at these business establishments doesn't mean we aren't paying somewhere for shortchanging these employees.
IF these people got what they wanted on a large scale, the market wouldn't just treat them like they are in a vacuum. That's not how a market works. Historically, when large groups of people get pay raises, it puts pressure on other employers to raise the wages of their employees as well, even if their employees do a more valuable job than those that originally got a raise. By raising the market value of less valuable employees when your market value stays the same, the incentive to stay at your current employer goes down because even though your pay stays the same, your relative worth in the marketplace is less. So employers that wish to retain the talent they currently have will most likely give you a raise as well as an incentive to keep you employed there.
Good for you.
That kind of worldview would work perfectly fine if there were a limitless supply of better jobs out there for anyone that was willing to apply themselves enough to get one. It's too bad this world isn't the perfect utopia you envision, because there aren't enough jobs of ANY kind out there for everyone to get a job, let alone ones that pay well enough to live off of. It wasn't but a couple years ago that there were 5 million more people looking for work of any sort than there were jobs available. It's better now, but not to the extent that you think it is.
It's also worth noting that people who were born poor probably have enough debt and credit issues that they wouldn't be able to take out the loan they would need to go to school to obtain a better job. Millions of people are basically trapped in their station in life, no matter how hard they try to get out of it, and your solution is for them to just "get a better job," despite the several walls in their way that make it basically impossible? Sounds like you are in favor of a caste system.
This "screw you, got mine" mentality is just as dependent on an impossible utopia to succeed as communism is. It's a good thing that more and more people are seeing that worldview for the garbage that it is, and hopefully in a couple decades, it will sit alongside communism in history's dumpster of failed economic perspectives.
