Raise the Wage: Reports and Resources

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Raising the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour would benefit and raise the wages of 30 million workers.

Raising the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour would add at least $30 billion in additional spending to the economy each year for a two-year period.

For every dollar increase to the hourly pay of a minimum wage worker, the result is $2,800 in new consumer spending from that worker’s household over the year.

Raising the minimum wage has not increased unemployment in the past.

Over 70 % of Americans support increasing the minimum wage to $10 per hour and indexing it to inflation:

Increasing minimum wages at big-box retailers, like Walmart, would have little to no impact on the average shopper and would cost the large corporation next to nothing compared to their annual revenues. If Walmart increased the minimum wage for its workers to $12 per hour and we made the unrealistic assumption that 100 percent of that cost was passed onto the consumer, it would add less than 50 cents, on average, to each shopping trip. Instead, if 100 percent of the cost were absorbed by Walmart, the cost to increase the minimum wage for its workers to $12 per hour represents about 1 percent of its annual sales.

Two-thirds of low-wage workers are employed by large, profitable companies.

Two-thirds of low-wage workers are women.

Most minimum wage workers are not teenagers. Over 75 % of minimum wage workers in 2011 were at least 20 years old. Over 80 percent of the workers that would benefit from various proposals to raise the minimum wage in the past year are at least 20 years old.

The failure of the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation has increased income inequality in the past few decades.