On Tuesday, San Franciscans voted to raise their city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour for all workers by 2018, making it the highest in the country. While Seattle was ahead of San Francisco with its city council adopting a $15 minimum wage this June, that law will not fully take effect until 2021, and contains exceptions.

“Seattle inspired everybody,” said Alysabeth Alexander, vice president of SEIU Local 1021, which has 54,000 members across Northern California and played a large role in the San Francisco campaign. “It set the bar.”

These two progressive West Coast cities took different paths. In San Francisco, the union worked with other community partners to push for higher wages. Early in the year, the coalition began gathering signatures for the ballot initiative and building a ground campaign.

Advocates in Seattle, in contrast, went directly to the city council. The mayor then put together a committee made up mostly of business leaders, and its final bill contained several loopholes, including delaying the law for small businesses.

Alexander said organizers learned from what happened in Seattle as well as from other cities in the Bay Area.

“Figure out where your bottom line is and start organizing first,” Alexander said. “If you have the ability to get it on the ballot, start gathering the signatures yourself to get it on the ballot. Otherwise, if you look at what happened in the city of Berkeley and the city of Richmond, where it just went through a city council process, they weren’t able to get consensus on a solid measure, so there’s a lot of carve-outs, a lot of exemptions, and they are very, very confusing measures.”

San Francisco’s new minimum wage law, which was adopted via the ballot initiative process, is quite simple. The wage will increase from its current $10.74 to $11 on January 1, $12.25 on May 1, $13 in 2016, $14 in 2017 and reach $15 in 2018. There will be an annual cost-of-living increase afterward. There are no carve-outs for small businesses, tipped workers, etc. Their essential goal was to get to $15 fast.

“If you wait too long to get $15, with inflation, it’s not worth $15 anymore,” Alexander said, referring to how future inflation undercuts delayed wage increases. “We wanted to get people up as quickly as possible.”

In Seattle, however, employers with more than 500 workers are given until 2017 to reach $15 or to 2018 if they are providing health insurance. Businesses with fewer employees will be given to 2021 to phase it in. As it gradually increases, tips and health benefits are counted toward workers’ minimum wage.

These are the types of loopholes the San Francisco coalition worked hard to avoid. During the campaign, however, the city’s Chamber of Commerce threatened to add a competing measure on the ballot that would make exceptions to the measure.

“We really had to organize and stick to our guns and do a lot of press work and community organizing to show how much support there was for our measures and to keep competing measures off the ballot,” Alexander said.

The coalition’s ballot initiative, known as Proposition J, won more than 76 percent of the vote. Neighboring Oakland also saw a minimum wage victory on Tuesday, winning $12.25 starting March 2015. Nearly 200,000 Bay Area residents will benefit from the measures. Alexander said more than half of workers of color and female workers will get a raise.

In some ways, San Francisco had the right mix of politics to get $15 approved. It’s a prosperous, progressive city with an extremely supportive mayor, who pushed for $15. Even many of the city’s small businesses supported the measure. But Alexander maintains that $15 can win anywhere.

“Workers just have been screwed over the last decade, and people just really need a raise,” she said. “Folks are working two to three jobs to make ends meet. I know folks that are renting floor space because their wages are too low. And workers everywhere are feeling the crunch, and are ready to lift up the standards.”

The 2014 midterm elections exemplified this. Minimum wage increases won in four red states: Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota.

“There’s so much corporate money and lies in politics, and I think a lot of people are feeling disillusioned at the federal level,” Alexander said. “But voters want to see change and when the issues are clear, they vote the right way.”

From fighting for affordable housing to protecting rent control, Alexander said there is still a lot of work to be done for economic justice in San Francisco, where cost of living is extremely high. With wage theft being a big problem in the city, the coalition is also working on creative ways to ensure the new minimum wage will be enforced. In addition, they are pushing for a Retail Workers’ Bill of Rights in order for workers to gain a fair and predictable schedule and full-time hours.

“Even if we are raising the minimum wage, workers who are working four hours here and six hours there, they’re not being able to fully benefit from it because their hours are so precarious,” Alexander said. “So it’s really important for folks to know what hours they’re going to work and to have access to full-time work when they need it.”

The union is still working on raising the minimum wage in other areas of the state.

“We were calling this effort Raise the Bay, where we were trying to look at raising the minimum wage in as many cities as possible in 2014 and 2015,” Alexander said. “But we’re getting so inspired by the wins, and we’re getting so many calls throughout California, that it’s gone from Raise the Bay to Raise California.…There are so many opportunities to win locally and just no momentum at federal level. We can do things now to create the momentum and then give leverage at the state and federal levels to do the right thing for all working people in this country.”

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