From the Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epi.org/):
32 million U.S. workers would get a raise by lifting the federal minimum wage to $15/hour by 2025, but who are these workers? Chances are, not who you’d expect.
When we think about minimum wage workers, we tend to think of young people working part-time jobs to earn extra spending money, but the reality is quite different. As we show in the graphic below, minimum wage workers are, on average, 35 years old; the majority are women; and the majority are working full-time.
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Past research shows that these workers are often the primary earners for their families, producing the majority of their family’s total income. And a sad truth about our federal minimum wage is that it is currently a poverty wage. A federal minimum wage hike to $15/hour by 2025 would lift almost 3.7 million people out of poverty.
A full-time worker can earn approximately $15,262 per year at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, but the poverty threshold for a two-person family is at $17,543. That means a federal minimum wage worker lives in poverty if they are supporting just one other person, let alone a family of four. EPI’s research shows that, if the federal minimum wage were raised to $15/hour by 2025, a minimum wage worker would earn around $28,677 annually—which falls above the current poverty threshold for a four person family of $27,021.
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