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Black, Hispanic women make up bigger share

A $15 minimum wage would have a different effect now than when it was first widely discussed years ago. The share of Americans earning less than $15 has fallen steadily over the past six years — and become increasingly female and increasingly Black and Hispanic.

As the U.S. nears its 12th straight year with a federal minimum wage of $7.25 and a raise appears both possible and evasive, it’s worth stepping back and calculating exactly who earns less than $15 in the United States, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

About 39 million people earned less than $15 in 2019, a figure that fell to about 30 million after the coronavirus pandemic as the closures of countless low-wage employers erased millions of jobs. Black and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely as white men to fall into this low-wage category, and their share of the low-wage workforce has increased even as the U.S. economy had its longest expansion in history.

This report uses 2019 data because the recession of 2020 probably will not be representative of the years to come. The calculations included tips, overtime and commissions as part of hourly earnings, though the results do not tend to change when those are excluded. By that measure, the typical (median) American worker earned about $20.20 an hour in 2019.

The 39 million workers earning less than $15 in 2019 represented about 28 percent of the workforce. As recently as 2007, most workers in the U.S. earned less than $15 — about $19 in today’s money. Very few workers earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: 247,000. Another 865,000 earned less than that, probably because of wage theft and exceptions for tipped workers and others.

The share of this group of workers fell rapidly in recent years as an increasingly competitive labor market and state and local minimum wage raises pushed major employers to raise wages.

Women are more likely than men to earn less than $15 an hour, and Black and Hispanic people are more likely to fall below that threshold than their white and Asian peers, the Washington Post found. About 46 percent of Hispanic women and almost as many Black women (39 percent) still earn less than $15 an hour. About 18 percent of white and Asian men would fall below that threshold.

Other groups are also more represented among workers earning less than $15 per hour. More than 85 percent of workers under age 18 earned less than $15 an hour, but teens make up a small share of the low-wage workforce. They’re outnumbered by workers over age 60 — more than a quarter of these older workers earn less than $15 an hour, and they make up a tenth of the low-wage workforce.

The typical Hispanic worker is five years younger than the typical white worker, but young age alone does not explain why Hispanic Americans are overrepresented in low-wage jobs. At almost every age, Hispanic men and women are more likely to be doing low-wage work than their white friends. (In this analysis, “white” refers to non-Hispanic white.)

Hispanic workers are also more represented in many of the occupations with the highest share of low-wage workers, particularly in agriculture and cleaning.