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strictnein

Correct. And how it turned out is that very, very few people earn minimum wage.

In 1979 it was 13.4%

In 2017 it was 2.3%

In 2017, 1% of workers aged 25 or older earned minimum wage. 8% of working teenagers do.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm

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Somebody earning pennies more than minimum wage would be excluded from this analysis, despite the fact that they’re earning poverty wages and would benefit from an increase to the minimum wage.

> the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, reporting that increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour would affect 17 million workers who are currently making below that. Another 10 million additional workers earning slightly above $15 per hour would be affected.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/15-minimum-wage-would-benefi...

The data from 1979 would also have those same people who earned just over minimum wage.

Of course drastically increasing the minimum wage would affect a bunch of people.

>, despite the fact that they’re earning poverty wages and would benefit from an increase to the minimum wage.

It could lose them their job, or not. You don't know that. Nobody knows that. That's why if you must raise the minimum wage, you do it slowly, step by step.

While it's true that very few people earn exactly the federal minimum wage, which is what your source is discussing, it's probably worth mentioning that "Currently, 29 states and D.C. have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour." [1] Saying that "very few people earn minimum wage" while referring to federal minimum wage statistics is not particularly informative - and even the statistics you cite are somewhat misleading, as they refer to people earning the federal minimum wage or less, although it's implied that those earning less are mostly tipped workers.

It turns out to be somewhat difficult to find statistics for which fraction of workers earn their state's minimum wage or less; focusing just on California [2], it seems that at least 4%, or ~630,000, CA workers were earning at or below the CA minimum wage in 2017. In other words, the 1.3 million figure given as "the number of minimum wage workers" is almost certainly off by a large factor, once you take into account different minimum wages.

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-min...

[2] https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/data/oes-employment-a...; the 630k figure comes from looking at the industries in the "State of California" summary sheet that have a "25th percentile" wage of 10.50 or less, then taking 25% of the workers in those industries to get a lower-bound estimate.

From the reports fine prints: "Estimates of the number of minimum wage workers in this report pertain only to workers who are paid hourly rates. Salaried workers and other workers who are not paid by the hour are excluded, even though some have earnings that, if converted to hourly rates, would be at or below the federal minimum wage. Consequently, the estimates presented in this report likely underestimate the actual number of workers with hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage."

Could it be that the structure of labor changed since 1979 with more salaried worker at minimum wage?

FWIW, you can't be classified as salaried and exempt from FLSA if you're getting paid minimum wage and working 40 hours/week or less. The federal limit for salaried exempt is equivalent to like $17/hour, and many states tie it to a multiple of minimum wage (e.g. 2x minimum wage in California)

What about the "independent contractor" loophole?

If there was a significant % of salaried workers at minimum wage that would be quite a story. But this seems rather unlikely, unless you have some evidence to the contrary?

You realise your point is moot right? The economic arguments against the minimum wage rely on the idea that it's a necessity to underpay for business to function. The less people underpaid, the less strong the argument for having to ensure a low or no minimum wage.

My "point", if there was any, is just that very few earn minimum wage. Therefore comparing <random high earner group> to minimum wage is pointless and kind of strange.

More meaningful would be comparing to the first quintile of wage earners.

The economic arguments against minimum wage are that you are not underpaying the employees in the first place. If the only job these people can do pays minimum wage then that is how it is. If they could do better jobs they wouldn't get paid minimum wage. Therefore the minimum wage either does nothing and is purely cosmetic or when it does something it prevents the labor market from functioning properly.

It's like rent control. It's just a tool for politicians to deflect blame and shift the problem elsewhere for the benefit of their own careers.

Meanwhile a job guarantee would actually solve the problem by putting a salary floor but since everyone is asking for a minimum wage increase it is not going to happen.

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