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.
With an effort by Democrats to boost the national minimum wage stalled, a new report finds that on average, 1 in 3 U.S. workers are still making less than $15 an hour, and 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 apublished Tuesday by Oxfam America. The data help quantify how many Americans could be affected 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. Although 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 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.
The practice of a subminimum wage for tipped workers, which allows businesses to pay their workers $2.13 an hour on the good-faith belief that tips will make up the difference, is flagged as well. “The enforcement of that is very, very sketchy,” Henderson noted.
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