With an effort by Democrats to boost the national minimum wage stalled, a new report finds that on average one in three U.S. workers is still making less than $15 an hour, while the share of women and people of color earning that amount is even greater.
Nearly 52 million U.S. workers — or 32% of the country’s workforce — earn less than $15 an hour, according to a report published Tuesday by Oxfam America. The data help quantify how many Americans could be impacted by the Raise the Wage Act, which would set a $15 federal hourly minimum and has been pending in Congress since January 2021.
Women and people of color are more likely than their White and male counterparts to be lower earners, the study finds. While 25% of men earn less than $15 an hour, the figure is 40% for women. Half of working women of color reported the same.
“There's a history of why people were locked out,” Kaitlyn Henderson, one of the report’s authors, told Bloomberg’s QuickTake on Tuesday. “Overwhelmingly, it was discriminating against women and people of color, and we see the echoes of that even today.”
The national minimum wage was raised to $7.25 an hour in 2009, and by law an employer must pay the higher of the minimum salaries mandated by state or federal government. As a result, many minimum wage workers end up earning more than $7.25. But advocacy groups argue that even the proposed $15 an hour is too low. For example, an August 2021 report by USAFacts found that a worker earning that much...
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