Lifting Workers Out of Poverty: Ten years in, the movement to raise the minimum wage is gaining momentum across the country.

• Date: 01 April 2023
• Author: Johnson, Sharon

Kimberly Baker did everything right. She was at the top of her high school class and began working at the age of seventeen in a grocery store in Lincoln, Nebraska. She completed a degree in foreign languages while working full time in the insurance industry. But despite her skills and perseverance, the thirty-eight-year-old single mother earns only $13.26 an hour, too little to rent a modest apartment.

"I get by because my sixteen-year-old son and I live with my parents, retired nurses who own their home," Baker says. "Although I supplement my earnings in the insurance industry by working as a tutor of Latin and a translator of French, it is impossible for me to take vacations or to save for my son's college education or a master s degree that would enable me to land a job in a better-paying industry."

Baker's experience is common, says Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank that studies the impact of economic trends on workers.

"Unfortunately, low wages are widespread throughout the labor market," he tells The Progressive. "It is not just a problem of a teenager working after school to earn spending money, but an enormous burden for adults working two or three jobs for substandard wages that barely keep food on the table."

About one-third of the U.S. workforce--fifty-two million people--earn less than $15 an hour, according to Oxfam America. Eighty-nine percent of the workers whose annual pay is less than $31,200 are aged twenty or older, its March 2022 report found.

Women and people of color are disproportionately affected by low wages. Twenty-five percent of American men earn less than $15 an hour, while 40 percent of women do. That figure is 27 percent for white workers, compared with 46 percent of Latinx workers and 47 percent of Black workers.

"The problem is severe because the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not been raised in more than sixteen years, and is now worth less in inflation-adjusted terms than at any point since 1956," Zipperer says. "This is disastrous for workers, because EPI's family budget calculator shows that there is no place in the nation where a single adult without children can achieve an adequate standard of living with wages of less than $15 an hour."

But the good news is that the movement to ensure a livable wage for all Americans is gaining momentum. The Fight for $15, which began in 2012 with fastfood restaurant workers in New York City, is raising the wages of workers in retail, health care, and other fields that have historically been underpaid.

Thirty states, along with Washington, D.C., have increased their minimum wages above the $7.25...