Minimum Wage

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the cornerstone federal labor law that established the first federal minimum wage and overtime standards. As my colleague Colette Irving explains in her post today, the history of the FLSA has included some big steps forward — and a few steps back — for women over the past 75 years. 

The expansion of FLSA coverage in 1974 to domestic workers working in private homes was one such step forward, as women represented the majority of domestic workers who benefited from this expansion. But an exemption enacted at the same time had an adverse impact on women that has only grown worse over time. Specifically, the 1974 FLSA amendments created a “companionship exemption,” which Congress intended to exclude only casual babysitters or “elder-sitters” from the domestic service coverage. However, in 1975, the Department of Labor (DOL) interpreted this exemption very broadly to cover home care workers employed by third parties — workers who, prior to the 1974 amendments, had been protected under the FLSA’s provisions regulating enterprises engaged in interstate commerce. 

Since 1975, this expansive reading of the companionship exemption has proven to be disastrous for women, who represent about 90 percent of the home care workforce. Read more »

75 years ago today, President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) into law. For the first time in history, the federal government guaranteed men and women a minimum wage and overtime pay, extending basic workplace protections to all as a matter of law — an important step forward for the labor movement and for women’s equality, as many state minimum wage laws enacted in previous decades had only applied to women. However, while not exclusively geared towards women, the FLSA has contributed greatly to the economic empowerment of women in this country. 

The legislative victory of the FLSA came after years of negotiations spearheaded by the legendary Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. After joining President Roosevelt in 1933 as the first female cabinet member in history, Secretary Perkins set out to establish a “floor under wages and a ceiling over hours” [PDF, p. 34] for all American workers. President Roosevelt shared her conviction: "Our Nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.” 

When Congress enacted the FLSA in 1938, it boldly promised workers fair wages and hours, but limited that promise in scope. A late version of the FLSA “contained the bare essentials [Secretary Perkins] could support” and Congress stripped the final version even further, resulting in a series of exemptions to limit the types of industries that needed to comply with the Act (like agriculture). However, the FLSA has been amended several times, and, with each amendment, Congress has renewed the effort to fully implement its original goal of a fair day’s pay for all working men and women — with varying degrees of success. Read more »

Anyone who lives here can tell you that D.C. is a pricey place. In fact, D.C. was just ranked the nation's sixth most expensive city — the cost of living here is almost 45 percent higher than the national average and housing is an astounding 2.5 times higher. 

These sky high costs make it incredibly difficult to get by for D.C.'s low-wage workers. Boosting the wages of these workers would be a win-win for the District, increasing economic security for these families while also injecting money into the local economy. A bill currently under consideration by the D.C. Council, The Large Retailer Accountability Act of 2013, would do just this for the District's retail workers employed by some of the largest companies in the country, raising these workers' earnings to a living wage of $12.50 per hour. 

This bill would make a big difference to the city's thousands of retail workers, who live on wages that barely allow them to make ends meet. According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI), "retail workers in the city are three times as likely as others to live in poverty." Read more »

You probably knew that raising the minimum wage would help families escape poverty. But did you think that states with higher minimum wages would also have smaller wage gaps? If so, you’d be right! Yesterday NWLC released a new analysis showing that the average gender wage gap in states with minimum wages above $7.25 per hour (the minimum required by the federal government) is three cents smaller than the average wage gap in states with minimum wages of just $7.25. Three cents might not sound like a lot but if we shaved three cents off the national wage gap of 23 cents we would close it by over 13 percent!

We also showed that among the ten states with the widest wage gaps in 2011, only two had minimum wages above $7.25. Seven of the ten states with the narrowest wage gaps in 2011 had minimum wages above the federal level of $7.25 per hour.

This analysis has already received coverage in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Think Progress, The Week Magazine, Pew Stateline, and several state outlets. We’re excited that the connection between the minimum wage and the wage gap is getting such great attention.

It’s the first week in June: temperatures are rising, the cicadas are swarming, and many state legislatures are wrapping up their 2013 sessions. This flurry of legislative activity has included several important steps forward on the minimum wage.

The biggest news comes from Connecticut, where last week the legislature passed – and the governor signed – a bill to increase the state minimum wage from $8.25 to $9.00 per hour by January 1, 2015. This compromise measure will give a much-needed raise to minimum wage workers in Connecticut, about six in ten of whom are women. An additional 75 cents per hour amounts to $1,500 a year for full-time work, bringing annual wages up from $16,500 to $18,000. That’s a meaningful boost, but still about $500 short of lifting a family of three above the poverty line, much less what is needed in a high-cost state like Connecticut.

And there is a catch: Connecticut’s new law actually reduces the percentage of the minimum wage that employers must pay to workers who receive tips. Today, tipped workers like restaurant servers are entitled to a minimum cash wage that is 69 percent of Connecticut’s full minimum wage ($5.69 per hour). In 2015, when the regular minimum wage is $9.00 instead of $8.25 per hour, tipped workers will be entitled to a minimum cash wage that is 63.2 percent of the full minimum wage ($5.69 per hour) – that is, they will get no raise at all. While most of Connecticut’s minimum wage workers who will get a raise are women, women are also a majority of the tipped workers who will suffer from this unfair exclusion. Read more »

I’ve got to hand it to Minnesota’s legislature. In addition to last week’s House vote to legalize same-sex marriage (with the Senate expected to follow suit today), the House and Senate have now each passed a bill to raise the state minimum wage!

This is especially good news for women, who make up 70 percent of Minnesota’s minimum wage workers. Raising the minimum wage would improve economic security for thousands of women while boosting the state’s economy – and it could help narrow the gender wage gap because women are the majority of workers who would benefit. In Minnesota in 2011, the typical woman working full time, year round was paid just under 80 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.

But here’s the catch: the bills passed by the two chambers are quite different from one another. The House bill would raise the state minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2015, then index it annually to keep up with inflation. (Minnesota’s current minimum wage is actually only $6.15 per hour, but because federal minimum wage law prevails, most workers are entitled to a minimum of $7.25 per hour.) The Senate bill would raise the minimum wage to just $7.75 per hour by 2015, with no inflation adjustment. Read more »

Cross-posted from Policy Mic.

April 9 is Equal Pay Day, representing the date in 2013 through which women must work to match what men earned in 2012, thanks to the persistent gap between men’s and women’s median earnings. Women working full time, year round in the United States are paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts, and the gap is even wider for women of color; black women working full time, year round are paid only 64 cents, and Hispanic women only 55 cents, for every dollar paid to their white, non-Hispanic male counterparts.

There are a number of steps the federal government can take to help close the wage gap and promote fair pay for women, like preventing and remedying pay and other discrimination (by, for example, passing the Paycheck Fairness Act) and expanding women’s access to growing, high-paying jobs that are nontraditional for their gender. And here’s another important measure to add to that list: raising the minimum wage.

Women are nearly two thirds of minimum wage earners in the United States today and represent a large majority in most of the ten largest low-paying occupations. Women’s concentration in such low-wage jobs is one of the reasons women still typically earn less than men. A woman working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour makes just $14,500 in a year – thousands of dollars below the poverty line for a mom with two kids. Pay for tipped workers – like restaurant servers, who are about 70 percent women – can be even lower: the federal tipped minimum cash wage has been frozen at just $2.13 per hour for more than 20 years. Read more »

There’s a lot to report on the minimum wage today, but I’ll start with the biggest news: the New York legislature has approved the state’s 2013-2014 budget, which includes a minimum wage increase. Specifically, the minimum wage will rise from $7.25 to $8.00 per hour on December 31, 2013, to $8.75 one year later, and $9.00 on December 31, 2015.

This is good news for minimum wage workers in New York, nearly two-thirds of whom are women. But the phased-in minimum wage increase in the budget is weaker than the increase that the state Assembly passed just a few weeks ago, which would have raised New York’s minimum wage to $9.00 per hour in one step in January 2014, then indexed the wage annually to keep up with inflation. The budget also drops a provision in the Assembly-passed bill that would have raised the minimum cash wage for tipped food service workers from $5.00 to $6.21 per hour, but it does provide a path to an increase for these workers by authorizing the labor commissioner to have a wage board examine the adequacy of New York’s tipped minimum wage, then issue an order to raise the wage. Read more »

Momentum just keeps building towards a higher minimum wage. I reported last week that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which now has at least 25 co-sponsors in the Senate and 131 in the House. That’s a strong show of support – but we know the bill will still face opposition from some in Congress. So it’s heartening to see that a number of states aren’t waiting for the federal government to act to raise wages for their lowest-paid workers.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve noted proposed minimum wage increases in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, and Rhode Island. And just in the past couple of weeks, legislatures in several of these states have taken steps to move those proposals forward. This movement is especially good news for women, who make up the majority of minimum wage workers across the country and in most states. Read more »

I walked into a crowded room on Capitol Hill this week to witness my first congressional press conference. Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller were enthusiastic about their legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10.

I’ll be graduating from college in a few months, and I’m looking for my first job. But the issue of minimum wage isn’t something I’ve been thinking about. As a college graduate, I’ve been assuming that I’ll be able to find a job that pays well, despite the shaky economy. Amie Crawford, a college graduate and fast-food worker from Chicago stood at the podium and described what it’s like to work hard prepping food for the public but not have enough money to buy food for herself. I was stunned. Amie’s story made me wonder about the millions of other hard-working women who cut back on food, drop their health insurance, and go without child care in order to get by on a minimum wage salary. And I thought about their kids who might go to bed hungry.