Current NYC minimum wage is apparently 16.50. So a 1.8x increase over 5 years (how long are mayors for in NY?).
I... my inner labor 100% supports minimum wage increases. My inner realist understands that has a very substantial impact on businesses and tends to result in fewer employees doing more work (and rapidly getting them salaried so that overtime doesn't exist). Which has a net negative impact because now one person is getting paid a living wage rather than two people getting paid enough to live in a closet in a flat.
Which is why, like most things, the solution is to decouple life from work. Universal Basic Income is what we desperately need. It resolves the minimum wage issue AND automation. The former because Fred's Khlav Kalash ~~K~~Corner isn't destroying their margins to have more than one person working the counter and the latter because... we are RAPIDLY reaching the point where jobs permanently go away (see: Tech). And it actually fulfills the capitalist dream where the people working (because they want additional spending money or "to have a better life") actually want to be there.
And... I kinda think that is less of a pipe dream than a first term mayor managing to increase minimum wage by 1.8x in 5 years.
I'll also just add that NY, like much of the modern world (not just the US), is largely driven by commuters. People who wake up in Jersey or on the outskirts of town, drive in at 3 am, and then are part of the team that open up the shop at 4 so that you can buy your bagel when you walk out the door at 5:30. And... in a lot of ways that 16.50 goes a LONG way once you get to a place with a semi-reasonable cost of living... that said workers have difficulty enjoying because they are getting back home with just enough time to eat a meal and then go to bed.
Which is a very different problem and also why this kind of rubs me the wrong way the more I think about it. Don't get me wrong, there are LOTS of people barely existing in NYC. But a lot of them are people with REALLY good jobs who just still live in one of the higher cost of living places on the planet. Not so much the people getting minimum wage to make their coffee.