As politically charged as the minimum wage debate is, one fact gets overlooked: the number of workers earning the minimum wage has fallen for decades.
“Of current total employment in the US–which stands at 143 million– 78 million workers are paid hourly and 2.6mn workers paid at or below the minimum wage. According to the Bureau for Labor Statistics, the share of workers paid minimum wage or below has shrunk from about 15 percent to about 3 percent,” according to Yahoo! Finance.
The proportion of minimum wage workers is higher now than it was before the recession, but has been declining since 2010.
The state with the highest percentage of minimum wage workers is Louisiana, where 6.3 percent of its hourly workers earned the minimum wage.
For full-time workers, the prevalence almost disappears. Only 2 percent of full-time workers earn the federal minimum wage or less, compared to about 10 percent of part-time workers.
If a worker can find a full-time job, they are rarely affected by the minimum wage.
Furthermore, the young tend to face the effects of the minimum wage. About 15 of teenagers between 16 and 19 years old earned the minimum wage or less, and only 3 percent of workers 25 years old and above.
The political battle, as presented by unions and those who advocate a minimum wage increase, argue that an increase would help working families who struggle to make ends meet. In reality, minimum wage workers are overwhelmingly young and inexperienced. Raising the minimum wage offers the veneer of a solution while doing little to improve working conditions and earnings for the working poor.
The easier it is for young workers to enter the labor force, the better off they’ll be for career earnings. When young workers can’t get a foot in the door and gain working experience, it’s more difficult for them to advance in the labor market and achieve higher earnings.
“Hiking the minimum wage will almost certainly guarantee work will be harder to find, especially for young workers and those new to the workforce,” Bryant Jackson-Greene, a policy analyst for the Illinois Policy Institute, wrote.
A policy to help the working poor isn’t the minimum wage, which only targets a small cohort of hourly workers. Job growth, and a flexible labor market that allows easy entry, would do better. As politically useful as the minimum wage debate is, it does little to help the majority of workers earning a low wage.
