Nearly half of all Americans workers age 18 to 64 hold low
wage jobs according to a recently released study by the Brookings Institute.
Don’t let your MAGA hat wearing relatives and neighbors claim that’s all
liberal propaganda, Brookings may lean slightly left on analysis but their data
checks out every time. While even Texas, with one of the highest poverty rates
and some of the lowest wages in the country, has seen a reduction in the
percentage of workers earning minimum wage in the last couple of years the
fraction of workers earning near poverty level wages hasn’t shown any
improvement.
Nearly 6 in 10 low-wage workers work full time, year-round. 1
in 7 have a bachelor’s degree and more than 4 in 10 have children. When I was a
teenager in the late 70’s about 48% of teenagers worked year round now that's
down to less than 30% today so don't let anyone tell you that low wage jobs are
just for kids or that it’s just for part-time workers and the uneducated.
After inflation the federal minimum wage has dropped 17%
since 2009 and 31% since 1968. Workers earning the federal minimum wage today
have $6,800 less per year to spend on food, rent, and other essentials than did
their counterparts 50 years ago. A minimum wage worker in 1968 earned the
equivalent of $10.54 in today’s dollars, that’s more than nearly quarter of
today’s entire workforce earns.
Analysis by the Pew Research Center shows 19.8% of U.S.
adults ages 65 and older or nearly 10.5 million people, reported being employed
full- or part-time, likely because were unable to save for retirement due to
low wages. Older workers represented 6.6% of all employed Americans last July, that’s
more than double the 3% in July 2000. Workers 55 are a much larger fraction of
the workforce than in July 2007, just before the Great Recession generated mass
unemployment. Employment rates have returned to pre-recession levels for adults
younger than 55 but not increased like rates for older workers. Currently
workers 65-72 are working or looking for work at a rate 50% higher than workers
the same age in prior generations.
After inflation, wages for the working class Americans are
still below pre-recession levels. While worker productivity sharply increased,
total income for working class families has been falling since 1979 all while
corporate profits shot up. This includes wages for college graduates, whose
hourly wages have dropped significantly since 2000, according to the Economic
Policy Institute.
It is way past time for the United States to increase the
minimum wage. We can argue about how much it should be but there is no excuse
not to at least restore it to 1968 levels and while we’re at it index it to
inflation so low wage workers don’t keep getting the short end and have to
fight the same battle over again every decade.
Texas could raise the state minimum wage like quite a few
others have but Republicans here are averse to data driven decision making so
they refuse to acknowledge that those state which have raised minimum wage are
doing better than those which did not. Frankly I’d settle for the state
legislature repealing the law that prohibits cities from setting their own
minimum wages. We could then watch the results of come cities raising theirs
while others don’t and see which overall economy does better.
Published in the Seguin Gazette - January 8, 2020
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