Raise the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour
Wages and workers
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
Employers set pay and can lift wages above the legal floor on their own, as investor campaigns urge. More than 125 investors representing over $4 trillion signed the ICCR statement pressing companies to pay living wages, and shareholders in 2025 commended McDonald's for ending subminimum wages. Business lobbies are the primary obstacle to a higher legal floor. The National Restaurant Association formally opposed the Raise the Wage Act, warning against any nationwide increase.
How this was scoredPivotal
Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Common Ground of the American People: Low Income Assistance, Program for Public Consultation / Voice of the People, 2026 (studies February 2023, January 2017)
- Living Wage (investor statement and engagements), Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2023-11-14 (statement); page current 2026
- National Restaurant Association Opposes H.R. 582, 'Raise the Wage Act', National Restaurant Association, 2019-03-05
3 campaigns on record
Investors and advocates called on McDonald's to end subminimum wages for tipped workers and to treat payment of a living wage as a human right.
With One Fair Wage (advocacy partner, not an investor filer)
Result: This was an investor and advocacy engagement, not a proxy shareholder vote; no vote result applies.
McDonald's left the National Restaurant Association. ICCR and other observers linked the departure to McDonald's public criticism of the association's subminimum-wage advocacy, though neither organization confirmed that this was the specific cause.
Asked Dollar Tree's board to produce a report on wages and inequality, after finding that median associate pay ($13,490 a year) fell below the federal poverty threshold for a single person.
Result: Put to a vote at the June 13, 2023 annual meeting; Dollar Tree's board recommended shareholders vote against it. We could not confirm the exact vote count in the sources reviewed.
We found no documented change directly attributed to this proposal. Retail TouchPoints reported that Dollar Tree separately announced plans to raise average wages by about $2 an hour around the same period, but the source does not establish that this increase was a response to the shareholder proposal.
Asked the board to publish an analysis of what it would take to raise tipped workers' starting pay to the full state or federal minimum wage, with tips on top, rather than relying on the lower tipped minimum wage (the 'tip credit').
With Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica
Result: 12.4% of votes cast were in favor, on a for-and-against basis excluding both broker non-votes and abstentions, at the May 12, 2022 annual meeting; the proposal did not pass. The SEC Form 8-K reports 1,697,217 votes for, 11,951,398 against, 216,418 abstentions and 1,477,256 broker non-votes; including abstentions in the denominator gives 12.2%.
We found no documented change to Dine Brands' tip-credit policy following this vote. Dine Brands' board had opposed the proposal, arguing the tip credit lets servers earn above minimum wage.
Dine Brands Global, Inc. Form 8-K (Item 5.07, voting results), SEC EDGAR
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Common Ground of the American People's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.