{"id":13720,"date":"2014-11-05T14:03:09","date_gmt":"2014-11-05T19:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/%year%\/%monthnum%\/%day%\/making-more-than-minimum-wage-but-less-than-10-10-an-hour\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T03:20:20","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T08:20:20","slug":"making-more-than-minimum-wage-but-less-than-10-10-an-hour","status":"publish","type":"short-read","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2014\/11\/05\/making-more-than-minimum-wage-but-less-than-10-10-an-hour\/","title":{"rendered":"Making more than minimum wage, but less than $10.10 an hour"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"FT_14.10.17_lowWage\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n

Voters in four states easily approved ballot initiatives to raise their minimum wages on Tuesday, further evidence of strong public support<\/a> for the idea that the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour isn’t enough for today’s workers. The votes in\u00a0Alaska<\/a>, Arkansas<\/a>, Nebraska<\/a> and South Dakota<\/a>\u00a0mean that\u00a0by Jan. 1, 29 of the 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) will have\u00a0higher\u00a0minimums than the federal standard.<\/p>\n\n

President Obama and many Democrats have pushed for raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, although efforts in Congress\u00a0to do that fizzled this summer<\/a>. And with Republicans, who generally oppose raising the minimum wage<\/a>, winning control of the Senate and expanding their House majority yesterday, it’s unlikely that any new effort in Congress will get very far.<\/p>\n\n

Thanks to the\u00a0Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a>, we have a fairly good idea of\u00a0who makes the federal<\/em> minimum wage<\/a>. But we wondered about the demographics of workers who are a step higher on the wage scale — that is,\u00a0people earning above whatever minimum applies in their state but less than the $10.10 target. A barista making $9.10 an hour in Portland, for example, would be a minimum-wage worker there but wouldn’t show up in the BLS analysis. (The $7.25 federal minimum wage applies unless state or local law sets a higher rate.)<\/p>\n\n

After analyzing\u00a0public-use microdata<\/a>\u00a0for 2013 from the\u00a0Current Population Survey<\/a>\u00a0(the same monthly survey that underpins the BLS’s wage and employment reports), we\u00a0estimate that last year about 20.6 million people — 30% of all hourly, non-self-employed workers 18 and older — are in that “near-minimum-wage” category. That includes 8.8\u00a0million people in states with minimums above $7.25, and 11.8 million in states where the federal rate applies.<\/p>\n\n

This broader\u00a0group of low-wage workers looks much like the approximately 3.3 million hourly workers who earned the federal minimum or less<\/a> last year. (The $7.25 rate doesn\u2019t apply to tipped workers and a few other categories.) Altogether, nearly 24 million workers would potentially benefit from a minimum-wage increase to $10.10.<\/p>\n\n

The near-minimum are young (just under half are\u00a030 years of age or younger), mostly white (76%, a bit below whites’ 79.2% share of all wage and salary workers), and more likely to be female (54%) than male (46%). Most have low educational levels: 56% have no more than a high-school education, while another 37% have some college but less than a bachelor’s degree. Hispanics, who make up 16.4% of all wage and salary workers, comprise more than\u00a0a quarter (26.7%) of the near-minimum\u00a0group.<\/p>\n\n

Different demographic subgroups are more or less likely to fall into this low-wage group. For example, 46% of female Hispanic hourly workers were near-minimum in 2013, but only 25% of male hourly workers who are white were. Two-thirds (67%) of employed women with less than a high-school diploma were near-minimum, versus just 10% of women workers with master’s degrees or higher educational credentials.<\/p>\n\n

Looking at the U.S. by the Census’s regional divisions<\/a>, near-minimum workers generally were more common in the South than elsewhere. More than a third (36.7%) of wage and salary workers in the West\u00a0South Central division (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas) and 36.2% in the East\u00a0South Central division (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee) earned near-minimum pay, as did 31% of workers in the South Atlantic division (which stretches from Delaware to Florida). They were least common in New England, where less than a quarter (23.4%) of workers earned near-minimum pay.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year an estimated 20.6 million people — 30% of all hourly, non-self-employed workers aged 18 and older in the U.S. — earned above the applicable minimum wage in their state but less than the proposed $10.10\/hour 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