National Minimum Wage: We’re Number 17

In 2009, the US federal minimum wage was set at $7.25 an hour; despite repeated efforts to raise the rate, today it remains at $7.25. This is the longest period of time, since first enacted in 1938, that the rate has not increased. Adjusted for inflation, this minimum wage is 40 percent lower than the minimum wage ($1.60) set in 1970 ($11.95 in 2023 dollars). With the greater cost of food, housing, and other necessities following the pandemic, the $7.25 minimum has shrunk even further.

In 2013, Republicans in the House voted unanimously to defeat a bill that would have raised the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour; in 2014, a Republican filibuster in the Senate blocked similar wage increase. In 2019, Democrats introduced the Raise the Wage Act of 2019, with the goal of reaching $15 an hour by 2023, and eliminating the subminimum wage for tipped employees, which now is $2.13 an hour. Under this proposal, beginning in 2025, the minimum wage would be indexed to median wages, so that every year that the median wage grew, so too would the minimum wage. If enacted, the Raise the Wage Act would have affected 26.6 percent of the American wage-earning workforce, a total of 39.7 million workers. The proposal went nowhere, but was reintroduced two years later by Sanders and Scott.

While Congress has stalled, several cities and states have adjusted their minimum wages to keep up with inflation. In 2012, an advocacy campaign, Fight for $15, was launched among fast-food workers. Since then, several states and cities have increased, or soon plan to increase, their minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Four countries, Luxembourg, Australia, France, and Germany, have minimum wages above $12 per hour.

Sources: Raise the Minimum Wage website,

https://raisetheminimumwage.com/federal-campaigns/. “Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 by 2024 Would Lift Pay for Nearly 40 Million Workers,” Economic Policy Institute, February 5, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2024-would-lift-pay-for-nearly-40-million-workers/; “Ranking of OECD Countries by National Minimum Wage in 2021,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/322716/ranking-of-oecd-countries-by-national-minimum-wage/.