Anna McClure, Fellow

One of the questions we often get at NWLC is what policy makers can do to close the wage gap. In addition to steps like passing the Paycheck Fairness Act and combating punitive pay secrecy policies, one thing policy makers could do is to raise the minimum wage.

People rarely think about raising the minimum wage as a fair pay issue. But one of the reasons for the wage gap is women’s concentration in low-wage jobs. In fact, women make up about two-thirds of all minimum wage workers. So, raising the minimum wage would particularly boost women’s earnings.

Just a few weeks ago, Senator Harkin introduced the Rebuild America Act (S. 2252) which would gradually raise the minimum wage from $7.25 per to hour (a wage that leaves a mother with two kids working full time, year round, well below poverty) to $9.80 per hour over the next two-and-a-half years. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that this increase would benefit more than 28 million workers, nearly 55 percent of them women.

An analysis of state wage gaps provides additional evidence that a higher minimum wage can help close the wage gap. When you rank all of the states and the District of Columbia in terms of the wage gap, half of the top ten states with the smallest wage gap (giving DC honorary “state” status for this comparison) had minimum wages set at $8.00 per hour or above, including DC, Vermont, California, Nevada, and Massachusetts. And four of these five states, DC, VT, CA and NV, had the four narrowest wage gaps.

Well, it looks like we can breathe a sigh of relief when it comes to Florida’s recent attempt to slash wages for tipped workers. The Florida bill I blogged about earlier this week that would have cut the state’s tipped minimum wage by more than half has died in the state Senate. This is one death I’m happy to celebrate.

Unfortunately, the update from Arizona is not good. Yesterday, the Arizona House passed HCR 2056. The legislature has changed the ballot initiative since it was first introduced, but it has just changed how it would propose to cut the minimum wage. The initiative has been amended to remove the provisions cutting the minimum wage for tipped workers and young workers specifically, but language has been added that would end the current law policy of indexing of the minimum wage for inflation. This means that the state minimum wage, which is now slightly higher than the federal minimum ($7.65 an hour rather than $7.25), will only go up when Congress raises the federal minimum – and that’s not often. In fact, if the federal minimum wage were keeping pace with inflation, it would be more than $10 per hour, rather than the current level of $7.25.