About 40 percent of fast-food workers are 25 or older, a few years older than most college students, according to the National Employment Law Project. And $7.40 an hour isn’t enough.

Support for increasing the minimum wage, particularly among fast-food workers, has spread to major cities across the country. McDonald’s workers in Detroit went on strike this August, and about 100 workers picketed outside a Sterling Heights Walmart Friday, according to media reports.

Waves of protests in Michigan and across the country for a higher minimum wage aren’t populated by students still waiting for a high school diploma. People our age, and our parents’ age, are out there suffering.

After the economy started a terrifying decline that still is wreaking havoc, minimum-wage jobs increasingly became the only option for people scraping to get by. That could be a recent college graduate who hasn’t managed to land on their feet yet, or it could be a parent laid-off from General Motors searching for a way to pay their monthly bills. Maybe it’s the student sitting next to you in economics, forced to work two jobs to make it through school.

Peter Ruark, senior policy analyst for the Michigan League for Public Policy, or MLPP, told The State News in a previous interview that he has a hunch young people entering the workforce are hit particularly hard by shoddy wages.

Anyone who doesn’t have a job lined up right after college should be at least a little concerned about this. If you manage to find a decent paying full-time job right out of school, chances are one of your friends won’t. A good friend of mine picked up a second job in the service industry to pay back his student loans, and even then things were tight.

My mom, a highly educated college graduate, re-entered the job force at just the wrong time and had to compete with high schoolers for work paying just above minimum wage. If not for myself, I wish for her that there were more options out there to make a livable wage.

Especially when top executives are making more and more money, it’s pretty embarrassing that workers often have to work at least two jobs to get by, and sometimes even that isn’t enough.

Republicans warn raising the minimum wage might mean a freeze on hiring or increasing costs for consumers.

Bumping up minimum wage to $15 an hour could take things a step too far and create a jolting shock to Michigan’s economy, but a few bucks more is reasonable, especially considering an MLPP report showed most residents make less than they did 40 years ago because of inflation. Increasing wages might mean a strain either to consumers or to companies’ bottom lines, but the alternative is continuing to pay a pittance to people to maintain a profit.

Instead of blaming fast-food and minimum-wage workers for “not working hard enough” or for not being educated enough to land a better job, we need to realize that many of the people who barely can afford to pay rent with a McDonald’s paycheck are our friends and family. They deserve better than sleepless nights spent working a second shift and long hours worked for barely any money at all.

I’m not asking for a giant leap to $15 an hour for Michigan workers, but we need to step up and support a little extra help for those who need it most.