The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Black, Hispanic women highly represented in low-wage jobs
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. It also has become increasingly female, 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 lowwage 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.
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%) still earn less than $15 an hour.
About 18% of white and Asian men would fall below that threshold.
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 counterparts.
Hispanic workers are also more represented in many of the occupations with the highest share of low-wage workers, particularly in agriculture and cleaning.
White people make up a majority of the workforce, but a minority of those are in many low-wage occupations.
The states with the highest share of workers earning less than $15 an hour, such as Mississippi and West Virginia, tend to be familiar sights atop poverty lists. At the other end of the ranking, a number of states have already raised their minimum wage — plus an outlier, New Hampshire. Workers there can still legally earn as little as $7.25 an hour, but few do.
A simple total of the number of people earning less than $15 throughout the country is not the same as estimating the effect of raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025.
To do that, one must account for the likely wage growth between now and then: someone earning about $13.30 an hour now is likely to be earning about $15 by 2025 if their earnings slightly outpace inflation.