It's been 13 years since Congress raised the federal minimum wage, the longest period without an increase since 1938.
A recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis found that after adjusting for inflation, the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is now worth less than at any point since 1956. The purchasing power for workers making the federal minimum wage diminished by 27.4% since 2009, when the starting wage was last increased.
The trend "is really striking because we are a much richer country," Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Yahoo Finance. "Workers are vastly more productive. In fact, they're more than twice as productive as they were five decades ago, yet the wealth that we've gained in the meantime, the increases in productivity, in their benefits aren't being shared broadly."
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that as of 2020 1.5% or 1.1 million of the roughly 73.3 million U.S. hourly workers were paid at or below the federal minimum wage. The number of workers making the federal minimum wage actually decreased from 1.9% in 2019 as some states and companies moved to address stagnant minimum wages.
Pressure has been mounting in various parts of the economy to raise wages to a higher standard as rising inflation has eroded workers' purchasing power.
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