The Fight for $15 movement advocates for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for workers — but is that enough to live on in the U.S. today?

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist and author Rick Wartzman took a deep dive into the nation’s biggest employer: Wal-Mart. He says wages need a big boost.

Roughly one-third of the country lives in precarious financial circumstances, Wartzman says. In his new book, “Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism,” Wartzman argues that the government needs to step in and mandate a $20 minimum wage.

In the early 2000s, former employees across the country sued Wal-Mart for cheating them out of millions of dollars in overtime pay. In Texas, the company failed to pay out an estimated $150 million in wages.

Back then, Wartzman served as business editor at the Los Angeles Times when a team of journalists reported a Pulitzer Prize-winning deep dive into “the high human cost of low prices.”

“Those workers [were] really struggling to make ends meet and couldn’t certainly support a family,” he says.

In 2015, Wal-Mart started raising wages after facing pressure from unions, politicians, journalists, faith leaders and city councils, who denied the company expansion into certain urban areas. But the main reason, Wartzman says, was the impact of cutting labor costs to the bone from 2011 to 2013.

“Stores were dirty. Shelves were bare. Turnover was so high. The churn was so high: people just coming in...

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