LOS ANGELES —
Ken Rose, a restaurateur and chef in Sandy, Utah, said that though he has always paid his employees above his state’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, in the past few years, he’s had to bump employee pay higher than ever.
“For me, minimum wage is what you can hire an employee for,” Rose, who owns Tiburon Fine Dining, a contemporary American restaurant in Sandy told CNN. “$7.25 hasn’t been relevant for years.”
An ever-shrinking number of workers in the U.S. are paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour – and a growing chorus of unions, economists and even employers agree it’s out of step with today’s economic reality.
Only 141,000 U.S. workers were paid the minimum per hour in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down from 392,000 in 2019. And while many states have taken the initiative to increase the minimum wage into their own hands, twenty U.S. states still only require employers to pay $7.25 an hour – or only $2.13 per hour for workers who collect tips.
Overall, the legal pay floor in the U.S. hasn’t budged since 2009. It’s the longest period without a countrywide increase since the federal minimum wage was established in 1938. Adjusting for inflation, workers paid the legal hourly minimum in the 1960s and 70s were higher paid compared to today, according to the nonprofit think tank, the Economic Policy Institute.
However, despite numerous efforts, raising the federal minimum...
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