KASIL KAPRIEL is a 52-year-old single mother and Portland resident who was born in Micronesia. She works in customer service at the airport and earns $9.25 an hour—Oregon's minimum wage.

Kapriel can't afford to pay her $750 monthly rent at one time, so she's got a deal with her landlord to pay half the rent twice each month. Because of this arrangement, she gets stuck paying a late fee.

"I'm right on the edge here," Kapriel said recently. "That's why I am so desperate."

Get used to hearing stories like this—hundreds of Oregonians are starting to get rowdy about "poverty wages." Kapriel and other activists are pressuring state legislators to increase the minimum wage, and if lawmakers won't move on it, the group is campaigning to get the issue on the November 2016 ballot.

It's a movement years in the making. America's working poor first made a collective call for increased wages a couple of years back, when fast food workers in New York walked off the job and demanded raises. In the years since, cities like Seattle and San Francisco have passed ordinances increasing the minimum wage to $15.

But Portland's usually active activists didn't get fired up about this issue until this time last year, when two things happened at roughly the same time: Portland-based 15 Now PDX organizer Justin Norton-Kertson and other activists started holding events, and Nick Caleb—a Concordia University professor and attorney who made a last-minute bid for Commissioner Dan Saltzman's seat—made a $15 minimum hourly wage a central part of his platform.

A year later, the 15 Now campaign has gained a lot of traction.

In December, the Multnomah County Commission voted to raise county employees' wages to $15 per hour within three years. Two months later, Portland City Council voted to create a $15 minimum for full-time city staffers and contractors.

But the fight rages on. On April 13, activists from across the state descended upon the capital to testify at a joint Senate and House public meeting discussing more than a dozen bills that address increasing the statewide mandatory minimum wage.

Two days later, hundreds of protesters flooded downtown Portland streets, marching from O'Bryant Square to city hall and then to the Portland State University campus. The march was part of a national movement in more than 200 cities, which staged strikes and demonstrations protesting low wages.

Finally, on Friday, April 17, representatives from the 15 Now movement filed petitions with the state announcing their intention to get an initiative on the 2016 ballot, raising the statewide minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2019.

Senator Peter Courtney (D-Salem) recently told the Oregonian that he doesn't expect the minimum wage increase to make it through the legislature this session, which ends July 11.

"It doesn't seem like our leadership has the intention of moving forward on the issue, so we intend to take it to the people," says Norton-Kertson. "The latest polls in Oregon show 54 percent favor a $15 minimum wage."

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