What advantage is it to them to
stop the buying power of lower income workers?
Are they just selfish and hateful
or do they truly believe that the rich should be the only
class who deserves more buying power? thinkingblue
Congressional Democrats are pushing a
bill that would gradually raise the
federal minimum to $10.10/hour from $7.25 and index it to
the Consumer Price
Index. But the measure faces little chance of passing the
Republican-led House,
where many members argue that a higher minimum wage would
lead businesses
to cut jobs.
Meanwhile, states and cities are taking up the issue. On
Tuesday, the Washington,
D.C. City Council voted to raise the capital citys
minimum wage to $11.50/hour
from $8.25 by 2016. Last month, New Jerseyans voted to
raise their states
minimum wage to $8.25/hour and index future increases to
inflation.
Massachusetts state Senate voted last month to
raise its hourly minimum wage to
$11.00 from $8.00.
Though raising the minimum wage is broadly popular, there
are clear partisan
differences. Back in February, a Pew Research Center
survey found that 71% of
people favored an increase in the federal minimum to
$9.00/hour from $7.25. But
while large majorities of Democrats (87%) and
independents (68%) said they
favored such an increase, Republicans were split.
Here are five more facts about the minimum wage and the
people who earn it:
1 Adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage peaked
in 1968 at $8.56 (in
2012 dollars). Since it was last raised in 2009, to the
current $7.25/hour, the
federal minimum has lost about 5.8% of its purchasing
power to inflation.
2 Just over half (50.6%) of the 3.55 million U.S. workers
who were at or below
the federal minimum last year are ages 16 to 24; an
additional 20.3% are ages 25
to 34 (both shares have stayed more or less constant over
the past decade). That
3.55 million represents about 2.8% of all wage and salary
workers.
3 Nineteen states (plus D.C.) have set their own, higher
minimums, ranging from
$7.35 in Missouri to $9.19 in Washington State. (Some
cities and counties have
gone even higher San Franciscos minimum
wage, for example, is set to rise
19 cents to $10.74 next month.) Those states collectively
include 45% of the
nations working-age (16 and over), meaning the
federal demographic data dont
capture a significant share of the nations
lowest-paid workers. Fortunately, there
are other approaches.
4 Nearly 21.3 million U.S. workers (or 16.4% of the
workforce) would be
directly affected by raising the minimum wage to $10.10
by July 2015, as the
Senate bill referred to above seeks to do, according to
analysis of microdata
from the Current Population Survey by the Economic Policy
Institute (a labor-
backed research group that supports raising the minimum
wage). 85.5% of those
workers, according to EPIs analysis, are 20 or
older; 57.3% are female; and
39.4% are black or Hispanic (versus 26.8% of the
workforce as a whole).
5 While not strictly minimum-wage workers, almost 23.2
million Americans
(17.8% of all wage and salary workers) worked in the
nations lowest-paid
occupations as of last year, according to Pew Research
Center analysis of
occupational employment and wage data from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
Those occupations, defined as paying $10.15/hour
($21,112/year) or less, were
largely in a few categories: retail salespeople (4.3
million), cashiers (3.3
million), food preparers/servers, including fast-food
workers (2.9 million) and
waitstaff (2.3 million).