I do think employers should be conscious about the kinds of lives they set their employees up for, though we can talk about that without overgeneralization.
1. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of people making minimum wage or less are older than 25 years old.
2. A single person working a full-time job (32 hours) at minimum wage makes $12,064. The US federal definition of poverty for this individual would be anything below $12,880. So yes, minimum wage workers are literally, by definition, working for poverty wages.
For one, even with your statistics, half of folks employed are school-age. Also, poverty is measured by household. Confusing the math isn't a good way to make a quantitative argument.
But mostly your argument is a semantic trick around the word "poverty" to rationalize weighted terminology.
Again, I have strong feelings that employers should be conscious of the lives and prospects of their employees. For instance, having policies that lead to irregular patterns of night and day shifts that have to be unhealthy long-term. But we can have rational discussion about these issues.
The figure they used was for a household of size 1, so I don't think they confused the math and I think they made a perfectly strong quantitative argument.
By the way, even if it is just teenagers, I don't think that should somehow disqualify them from earning fair wages. They aren't being "provided" jobs, they work to produce value for a company, and and should be compensated fairly regardless of their financial situation.
88 percent of people making the federal minimum wage are older than 20. A third are older than 40. Median age is 31. More than half work full time.
We do this is Europe, we pay something called 'kid allowance'. In some places people make 10 kids for the allowance, ignore them or mistreat them and live on that money.
I didn't "pay my way through school washing dishes" or anything like that.
I wasn't supported by my family so the extra income through low pay jobs was critical.
Aren't they though? You don't get a discount on rent because you're not 20 yet, and being under 20 doesn't mean you have rich parents that can subsidize your lifestyle.
More specifically, having a roommate or two or living with some family unit is fairly normal at that age. So other income needs to be accounted for to make that semantic argument stick.
Of course not everyone can have employed housemates. But even in those cases, it's not clear to me that banning 16 year olds from working those jobs helps all those 16 year olds. It seems likely that many of them end up worse off.
The wealthy wouldn't notice. Their teenagers are entrepreneuring and racking up unpaid volunteer hours to pad resumes. The teenagers with jobs are the ones that could use the money.
The kids that are hard-working and poor will find something else to do. You don't have a right to exploit kids.
Besides I found really distasteful when I was in my 20s being told that I didn't need the additional money because I didn't have a mortgage.
I don't think we need to rely on employer moralism, so Dickensian.