Associated Press and the minimum wage
I just love it when the media celebrates completely useless feel-good legislation – like the minimum wage. The Associated Press is positively giddy about the $.70/hour increase scheduled for September, especially since it’s the only piece of legislation that the 2007 Reid/Pelosi Congressional session has been able to get signed into law;
The nation’s lowest-paid workers will soon find extra money in their pockets as the minimum wage rises 70 cents to $5.85 an hour today, the first increase in a decade.
It ends the longest span without a federal minimum-wage increase since the pay floor was enacted in 1938. The last increase came in September 1997, when then-President Bill Clinton signed a bill raising the minimum wage 40 cents to $5.15 an hour.
Legislation signed by President George W. Bush in May increases the wage 70 cents each summer until 2009, when all minimum-wage jobs will pay no less than $7.25 an hour.
Government figures show about 1.7 million people earned $5.15 or less in 2006.
So who are those 1.7 million low-income workers scheduled to be rolling in dough in a few weeks? Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2006, the number is actually 1.692 million out of the total workforce of 76.517 million workers – 2.2% of the workforce earn minimum wage or less. 1.2 million of that 1.6 number (3/4) earn less than minimum wage now – so how’s a minimum wage increase going to help them?
866,000 of them (over half) are between 16 and 24 years old – high school and college kids. 1.24 million of the total work in service related industries, the largest occupational group of minimum wage workers, out of that number, 880,000 are in food service and preparation (um, MacDonald’s), 24,000 are security guards, 52,000 are janitors. Only 340,000 work 40+ hours every week (less than 1 in 5 minimum wage earners) at the job for which they’re paid minimum wage.
477,000 have less than a high school diploma, 127,000 have college degrees (how many of those are grad students I wonder). 8,000 have master’s degrees, but there are no Phds making minimum wage – some kind of correlation there?
Not quite the picture of sustained poverty that AP would like us to think, is it? And that extra $28 bucks is going to do a world of good for them, huh? In ten weeks they’ll finally be able to afford that PSP they’ve wanted for playing video games in class.
