Hey, what do you know! It turns out that raising the minimum wage … raises pay for low-wage workers. Somehow, in the United States of America, this needs to be said.
The Economic Policy Institute looked at wage growth for the lowest-paid 10 percent of workers across the states, and it turns out that, for states that raised their minimum wage at least once between 2013 and 2018, it “was more than 50 percent faster than in states without any minimum wage increases (13.0 percent vs. 8.4 percent).” The effect was bigger for women than for men, which makes sense, since women are likely to be paid less.
This blog was originally published at DailyKos on March 9, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.