As Americans struggle with the toughest inflation in 40 years, many workers can reflect on another milestone today: It’s been exactly 13 years since the US last raised the federal minimum wage.
This is the longest the benchmark wage has remained stable since the nation first implemented a minimum wage during the Great Depression.
“Today is a sad anniversary in America,” the Patriotic Millionaires, a progressive tax group, said in a statement. “Lawmakers have turned their backs on tens of millions of low-wage American workers and revealed themselves beholden to the short-sighted interests of some of their ultra-wealthy donors.”
Since 2009, when the federal minimum rose to $7.25 an hour, it has lost more than a quarter of its purchasing power. Adjusted for inflation, today’s minimum wage hasn’t been worth that much since the 1950saccording to calculations by the Institute of Economic Policy.
"Since 2009, workers have endured the Great Recession, a global pandemic, historic inflation and massive changes in the cost of living," said the Patriotic Millionaires, who called the 7 hourly wage "deplorable" .25 dollars.
At that rate, a full-time worker earns $15,080 a year, just above the federal poverty line.
In the absence of federal action, many cities and states have done so theirs walked minimum wages, some of them to double the federal baseline. But 20 states, most of them in the South, follow the federal minimum today.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would give up to 27 million workers, or one-sixth of the US workforce, a pay raise.
If the minimum wage had risen along with worker productivity since the 1970s, it would currently stand at nearly $26 an hour, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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