I see that the EPI applauds the Washington D.C. city council’s decision to raise the minimum wage there from $8.25 to $11.50 over a three-year period and index it to inflation thereafter. ”Low wage workers across the nation need a raise,” they write.
But how many low wage workers in D.C. currently work at the minimum wage? The answer might surprise you. The most recent data shows that a mere 1% of all hourly and salaried workers in Washington D.C. were paid the minimum wage in 2012. That’s an incredibly tiny number.
And no, it’s not (just) because D.C. is a high-income city. The comparable figure for the nation as a whole was a mere 2.1%.
This makes me wonder just how much a minimum wage hike is supposed to help low-income workers. I suppose it’s possible that some very large percentage of workers is currently paid between $8.25 and $11.50 per hour, but what is the answer exactly?
The truth is that without any prodding from the federal government, employers in the United States already pay the overwhelming bulk of their workers (95.3%) somewhat more than the legal minimum. (A small fraction of workers are paid below the minimum wage — 2.6% in 2012, to be exact — and it’s hard to see how those folks would be helped by a higher minimum wage…)
So I want to know: just how many people are expected to be helped by marginal increases in the minimum wage? Is there granular-enough data on wages in the United States that we can get a good picture of that? How many work between $8.25 and, say, $10.10?
