Minimum Wage

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the issue of the rate of the minimum wage in the United States. The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 established that the federal minimum wage would increase from $5.15 an hour in 2006 to $7.25 an hour in three stages by 2009. While subsequent attempts to further increase of the federal minimum wage stalled, many states significantly increased their own rates over the next decade. Many people argue that even low-skilled workers deserve a "living wage," while others claim that a higher minimum wage would have a negative impact on the economy. The debate about the effects of raising the minimum wage—including on employment rates—remains a high-profile social, economic, and political issue. Much of this debate implicitly surrounds the issue of whether the private sector or the public sector should bear the burden of relieving poverty. Many sociologists and economists disagree on whether the government can (or should) attempt to tweak the economic system in order to encourage the market to effectively absorb low-skilled workers.

Overview

Historical Background. Before 1938, attempts to legislate a minimum wage at the federal level met resistance in the courts based on a "liberty of contract" principle. In short, the government was not prepared to interfere with the prerogatives of employers. Early state legislation dealing with a minimum wage requirement largely addressed the interests of female, immigrant, and child employees who worked in sweatshops and were not represented by unions (Herbert, 2006). Once the Great Depression arrived, however, the 25 percent unemployment rate was considered compelling grounds for state intervention and the establishment of a federal minimum wage (Levin-Waldman, 1998).

The real value (or, the "purchasing power") of the minimum wage increased rapidly after 1949 and reached a peak in 1968. This real value then fell about 40 percent between 1968 and 2006 due to inflation, including a sharp 20 percent drop between 1997 and 2006. Between 1949 and 1977, Congress increased the minimum wage whenever inflation caused its real value to fall below the level of income that one worker would require to keep a family of three above or near the poverty line. Since the early 1980s, however, a full-time job paying minimum wage has usually been just enough (about $15,000 a year now) to keep a single person with no children above the poverty line. In short, inequality of income has grown substantially since the 1970s (Dalmut, 2005, p. 94-98). In 2012, a restaurant industry CEO made 788 times more on average than a minimum wage worker made in a year (Eisenbrey, Sabadish, & Essrow, 2013).

If the minimum wage had been indexed for inflation in 1968 to account for the rising cost of living, it would have been between $9 and $14 an hour in 2006 rather than $5.15. The idea of indexing the minimum wage for inflation began to generate new interest in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and several states have enacted legislation to implement this policy (Pratsch & Sheth, 1999, p. 466; Uchitelle, 2006). However, the federal government avoided an increase on that scale. While the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 raised the federal minimum wage to $7.25 by 2009, the real value remained well below the 1968 level. Into the 2010s, minimum wage earners were worse off than they had been in 1968 or 1997 (Elwell, 2013).

According to a study by economists, 15 percent of American workers earned minimum wage in the 1980s. By 2012, that figure had declined to 4.7 percent (Rocheteau & Marat, 2007; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Minimum wage workers, 2013). It continued to decline through the 2010s, and those making minimum wage or less made up 1.9 percent of the hourly paid workforce in 2019 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Tipped workers (namely, servers) can legally be paid a minimum of $2.13 an hour if gratuities raise their pay to the minimum wage. Short-term agricultural workers, some minors, and some disabled workers can be legally employed for less than the minimum wage, and nearly 1.2 million workers earned less than the federal minimum wage in 2019 according to the BLS.

Increasing the Minimum Wage. Between 13 and 27 million workers (or 10–20 percent of the workforce) received a raise when the Fair Minimum Wage Act was fully implemented in 2009 (Pratsch & Sheth, 1999; Economic Policy Institute, 2007). In other words, 33 percent of the American workforce earned less than $7.25 an hour in 2006 (Uchitelle, 2006). About 15–20 percent more women and ethnic minorities than white males benefited from this raise (Economic Policy Institute, 2007). The vast majority of minimum-wage workers occupy the service sector, which tends to be very stable. Fast-food chains such as McDonald's and Burger King will not likely relocate to another state or nation if the minimum wage increases locally or nationally (Porter, 2007).

Some employers who pay roughly the minimum wage have been willing to consistently keep their wages slightly higher than the local standard in order to attract good employees. For similar reasons, other employers will not pay sub-minimum wage amounts to workers (for example, to out-of-state minors) even when doing so would be legal. The theory is that a worker's perception of receiving a fair or advantageous wage will improve worker performance and reduce employee turnover, which is invariably high and relatively costly in the service sector. This principle is referred to in terms of shaping workers' incentives and acknowledging workers' reservation wage. A "reservation" wage denotes the minimum level of pay that a worker is willing to accept for a specific type of work. One might, for example, be willing to accept less pay (to lower one's reservation wage) for a job that is undemanding, familiar, or otherwise convenient (e.g., that will reduce travel expenses). A raise in the minimum wage is generally thought to attract more semi-skilled or semi-experienced workers to the low-paying job market and thereby increase competition for low-end jobs (Simon & Kaester, 2004; Falk, Fehr, & Zehnder, 2005).

There is statistical evidence that a substantial increase in the minimum wage has triggered relatively consistent patterns of unemployment among the least-skilled workers. The 90 percent raise in the minimum wage in 1947 resulted in about 15,500 jobs losses; the increase in 1972 resulted in 90,000 job losses; and after 1974, 120,000 long-term job losses can be linked with increases to the minimum wage. These effects tend to last from about one to five years (Wolfson & Belman, 2003). This pattern has been termed the "perversity thesis" in which a social policy meant to help poor workers accidentally may have the opposite effect for some of them (Pratsch & Sheth, 1999, p. 465). Similar effects were suggested by a US Congressional Budget Office study released in 2019, which reported that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would likely decrease the number of people below the poverty threshold by 1.3 million but also result in approximately 1.3 million job losses. The study also suggested that a minimum wage increase to $12 would likely trigger about 0.3 million job losses while decreasing the number of those in poverty by 0.4 million, while a raise to $10 would have little effect on jobs or poverty levels (Congressional Budget Office, 2019).

Alternative approaches to increasing the minimum wage for the purposes of combating poverty include expanded tax credits (which exist in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income workers with two or more children), direct or indirect subsidies to workers, and subsidies to employers. All of these approaches transfer more of the burden for relieving poverty from the private sector to public resources.

Despite significant political opposition to increasing the federal minimum wage, polls have shown strong public support for such a move. A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of Americans favored raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, with 41 percent noting strong support. Views were sharply divided by political outlook, however; 86 percent of Democrats and left-leaning independents indicated support, compared to 43 percent of Republicans and right-leaning independents (Davis & Hartig, 2019).

The Living Wage. In the early twentieth century unions attempted to establish wage increases under the principle of a "family wage." A family wage was supposed to provide a male worker with enough income to support a wife and child. Most married women then did not receive income. With gains in women's rights, this notion of a family wage is largely outdated. However, some scholars have revived the general idea due to the steep decline in purchasing power in the twenty-first century, arguing that even two minimum-wage earners would struggle to provide for a family. More widely used today is the concept of the "living wage," meaning an amount that allows a reasonable lifestyle beyond bare subsistence (Bloomenthal, 2020).

One system for ensuring a living wage ties the minimum wage to an index of inflation or cost of living, and adjusts accordingly. A number of states, cities, and counties have enacted living wage measures that account for localized prices. These measures usually only apply to workers who hold state contracts such as home health-care workers, garbage collectors, and security staff (Shipler, 2004, p. 291; Greenhouse, 2007). Housing expenses in large urban areas are often twice as high as in rural areas in the same state (Dalmut, 2005). Establishing a mandatory living wage is considered not an alternative to increasing the minimum wage but rather a significant extension of essentially the same approach that primarily benefits semi-skilled workers.

The nation's first state-wide living wage legislation was enacted in Maryland. Virtually all employees holding state contracts were required to receive a minimum of $8.50 an hour in rural areas and $11.30 an hour in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Similar local legislation elsewhere requires an hourly wage as high as $14.75 for workers holding a state contract (Greenhouse, 2007). Over the decade following the full implementation of the Fair Minimum Wage Act in 2009, many states as well as counties and cities enacted minimum wages above the federal level. By 2020, seven states had tied annual increases to inflation or cost-of-living indexes in an effort to maintain the purchasing power of the minimum wage, and several others were on track to adopt such measures (DeSilver, 2020).

A Washington State University study concluded that minimum wage increases at the state level have been beneficial to 97 percent of low-skilled workers (Egan, 2007). However, not all evidence is as encouraging. The long-standing conventional argument among economists until the early 1990s was that a substantial increase in the minimum wage would price low-skilled workers out of the lowest level of the labor market. In other words, raising the minimum wage would encourage employers to eliminate the least-productive workers or cease to hire new entry-level workers. A later revision of this argument, known as the Card-Krueger thesis (or paradox), asserts that a higher minimum wage may not necessarily increase the rate of unemployment and can have non-detrimental or even beneficial results across the board; that is, in terms of wages, fringe benefits (such as health care), and employer productivity. Prices almost invariably increase after the rise of the minimum wage, but overall sales in the service sector have not suffered significantly according to most research.

The Card-Krueger Thesis: A Paradox?. This result is based on some specific studies of the fast-food industry after state minimum-wage rates were increased by about 10 percent circa 1990. The conventional logic was that a 10 percent raise in the minimum wage would result in a 1 percent rise in unemployment for adults and a 2 or 3 percent increase for teens. Those who have investigated the Card-Krueger model further have usually concluded that a large increase in the minimum wage results in an extensive reorganization of the employment patterns of low-skilled workers but not a decrease in overall employment or earning. Perhaps the most questionable element of the Card-Krueger model is that it is most applicable to states that were relatively prosperous before a higher minimum wage was established, whereas the conventional model may apply more to poorer states or during times of severe recession.

The number of scholarly studies about the minimum wage quadrupled around the time that Card and Krueger (1994; 1995) published their influential and controversial early study (Wolfson & Belman, 2003). Curiously, David Card and Alan B. Krueger actually intended to confirm the consensual hypothesis of economists but arrived at largely antithetical conclusions. The Clinton administration used their work to support its efforts to raise the minimum wage.

Card and Krueger (1994; 1995) initially studied the effect of the raise in the minimum wage in New Jersey circa 1989 for 410 fast-food restaurants with reference to similar restaurants in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, which did not increase its minimum wage. They concluded that the New Jersey fast-food outlets were able to absorb the higher cost of labor by raising prices by 4 percent, that there was no loss of non-wage benefits (e.g., health care benefits) for workers, and that those fast food chains in New Jersey were able to open new franchises at their usual rate (Levin-Waldman, 1997; Ross, 2000; Porter, 2007). Only those New Jersey stores that paid more than the new minimum wage employed fewer workers than they had before the rate was increased. Others stores hired or employed more employees than they had previously and employment rates in New Jersey grew faster than those in Pennsylvania (Levin-Waldman, 1997; Porter, 2007).

This surprising result called for revision of the conventional logic about "monopsonistic" competition, which denotes an inverse condition to the better-known term "monopoly": a monopsonistic market is one in which there is only one buyer and many sellers (in this case, of labor). In theory, a wage higher than the prevailing wage should result in a decrease in employment and perhaps in prices. Card and Krueger did not call for a thorough revision of major elements of conventional economic theory, but their study opened the flood gates for such revisionism (Card & Krueger, 1995; Ross, 2000).

One possible and very straightforward interpretation of the Card-Krueger thesis is that the minimum wage has been excessively low since the 1980s in terms of the profits its recipients produced for employers. On this interpretation, employers (particularly fast-food restaurants) held the monopsonistic power as the primary employer of minimum-wage earners. In 1997, the lowest prevailing wage in any single industry (the retail industry) was a median hourly wage of $7.29. A prevailing wage, furthermore, is almost entirely derived by the market rather than any imposed government policy. Past increases of the minimum wage have only brought it roughly up to this level of a prevailing wage (Levin-Waldman, 1997). Other possible interpretations of the Card-Krueger paradox include "positive demand shock" (which seems to indicate competition for a shrinking labor force), the "product market power" of the fast-food franchises in question, and a substitution of additional labor for additional capital (Bhaskar & To, 1998, pp. 10-11).

Roughly one in three minimum-wage earners receives a fringe benefit such as health insurance, which on average is worth about a third of the total compensation for work. Increases in the minimum wage at both the state level and federal levels did not result in decreased fringe benefits in the 1990s. There was some reduction in on-the-job training, but not in pre-employment skill requirements. Surprisingly, more applications were submitted for jobs that paid minimum wage than for jobs that paid more during the decade. Unsurprisingly, more people quit jobs that pay minimum wage than better-paying jobs (Simon & Kaester, 2004). Card and Krueger also studied teen employment in the fast-food industry in California. They found that teen unemployment fell to a rate of about 33 percent lower than the national rate after the minimum wage was raised in that state (Levin-Waldman, 1997).

Other Studies. Luttmer (2007) found that the rise in the minimum wage between 1990 and 1991 resulted in an increased rate of unemployment among unskilled workers formerly earning minimum wage, but also that those losses were offset by an increased rate of employment among workers with a slightly more advanced skill set. Both of these groups, however, are classified as low-skilled workers. A large increase in the minimum wage also resulted in a lower rate of employment among low-skilled workers who valued their jobs more than those who valued them less. Luttmer terms this concept an efficient allocation of jobs, and raising the minimum wage had a positive correlation with this characterization of efficiency. Luttmer also concludes that raising the minimum wage is a limited vehicle for addressing poverty (2007, p. 27). The conventional logic of economists asserted that raising the minimum wage or not eliminating it entirely would result in extensive "deadweight loss" of productivity through an inefficient allocation of resources. Luttmer's study suggests that raising the minimum wage might actually reduce deadweight loss by introducing more competition and variety into the low-paying job markets.

Other studies have arrived at similar results. After the minimum wage was increased to $8.50 an hour in San Francisco, there was no overall decline in employment or of business. Health insurance coverage and full-time employee tenure increased in limited-service restaurants, but so did prices. Full-service restaurants, however, switched to primarily employing tipped workers to minimize labor costs. Dube, Naidu and Reich (2005) conclude that a large increase in the minimum wage is likely to result in such a substantial reorganization of the labor market into more varied and less standardized practices. In other words, employment patterns are likely to become more differentiated in local pockets as the minimum wage increases (Dube, Naidu, & Reich, 2005, pp. 25-26). The consistently high rate of employee turnover in the service sector allows for the quick adjustment to changes in pay on the behalf of employers (Addison, Blackburn, & Cotti, 2008). The relative rate of employee turnover, however, is an important element in determining how much an increased minimum wage affects the cost of doing business in the service sector. Minimizing turnover can help to balance out the increased expenditure on labor (Uchitelle, 2006).

Viewpoints

Spending Power & Competition for Minimum-Wage Jobs. Scholars who have applied the Card-Krueger thesis to more recent employment patterns emphasize different economic principles than the old guard of economists. For example, lower-earning individuals and families very frequently spend everything they earn and thereby stimulate the economy when they earn more. Early efforts to establish a minimum wage (until about 1923) similarly argued that the state had an obligation to allow laborers to increase their bargaining power with management and thereby increase their earning and spending abilities (Pratsch & Sheth, 1999, pp. 479-480). In 2006, the CEO of the mega-retailer Wal-Mart argued publicly that the minimum wage should be increased in order to bolster the purchasing power of Wal-Mart customers. Although Wal-Mart, which became the largest private employer in the US, has been a frequent target of advocates of low-income workers, the company raised its internal minimum wage to $9 an hour in 2015, $10 in 2016, and $11 in 2018 (Bloomenthal, 2020). Other companies have also voluntarily instituted higher minimum wages to attract employees and boost loyalty and morale.

Examples from specific jurisdictions have informed arguments for or against minimum wage increases. A high minimum wage in Washington State attracted eager workers from the neighboring state of Idaho, and the rise in prices was not seen to hurt business. Neighboring states to those with a substantially higher minimum wage are often compelled to raise their rates of pay in order to attract employees. Although higher wages in Washington State also reduced the costs associated with a high turnover rate of employees, this tendency seems to counter the national trend. The minimum wage in Washington, which has enjoyed substantial job growth in recent years, is raised slightly each year to reflect the consumer price index. Unsurprisingly, the proportion of minimum-wage jobs in Washington State is very low by national standards (Egan, 2007).

This circumstance has not been of much aid to workers earning minimum wage or less in Southeastern states, where wages have usually been the lowest in the nation. A "states' rights" style approach to social policy has not conventionally been associated with liberal politicians and policies until recently (Uchitelle, 2006). The state government of Alabama has granted foreign vehicle manufacturers subsidies in order to raise the wages of workers but also millions of dollars in tax breaks and an environment with minimal union interference. This approach to subsidizing workers is an alternative to raising the minimum wage. Shipler (2004) argues that although the Earned Income Tax Credit that benefits low-earning parents "looks like a subsidy of the employee, it acts as much to subsidize the employer, who can pay low wages without causing the worker too much pain" (Shipler, 2004, p. 291). The Card-Krueger thesis, however, does not seem to explain much about areas of the economy in which competition for labor benefits employers rather than employees.

Rather surprisingly, Grossberg and Sicilian (2004) conclude that a low minimum wage in comparison with median state wages for male workers leads to less employee-initiated turnover and vice versa. In other words, a relatively high minimum wage tends to lead to higher employee turnover among male workers. Employment patterns for low-earning women are essentially uniform regardless of pay in this context. Family-based fringe benefits seem to be a more important factor for women. A substantial hike in pay in one area, however, frequently leads to a high employee turnover rate in lower-paying areas (Grossberg & Sicilian, 2004, p. 643-655).

Newman (2006) traced the development of a single group of 300 applicants for a fast-food chain that advertised for minimum-wage workers in Harlem in early 1993 and found some surprisingly encouraging results. Completing a college degree or vocational training was not unheard of for that group, but the third of the most-successful 40 of them that earned more than $15 an hour several years later largely remained in working-class positions. Among those 300 applicants, those who later received welfare or unemployment benefits claimed they were even more convinced of the personal and moral value of work than those that had worked steadily during the previous decade (2006, p. 226). In short, those former minimum-wage workers clung to what Newman describes as the traditional middle-class emphasis on the value of work (2006, p. 272). This group, sometimes referred to as an "underclass," that did secure well-paying industrial jobs congregated together and privately shared contemptuous attitudes toward their supervisors and the work-related rules in general, but they nevertheless primarily seemed to derive their identities and sense of value from work. Newman argues that too much emphasis has been placed on the "oppositional subculture" as a differentiating feature of urban minorities (2006, p. 232). Newman does not literally seem to assert that minimum wage jobs function as the proverbial education for the working class, but this idea is implicit in the more optimistic-than-usual story she tells.

Mobility & the Minimum Wage. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, characterized raising the minimum wage as a salary hike for suburban teenagers rather than a means of combating poverty (Henderman, Jr. & Sherk, 2006). The following statistics are proffered in support of that assertion, but the facts themselves seem to tell a slightly different story. In 2012, the total number of people earning minimum wage or less (plus tips) was 3.6 million or 4.7 percent of the workforce. Slightly more than half were under the age of twenty-five and slightly less than half were older (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2013). In 2006, the families of those under twenty-five near or below the poverty line amounted to 16.9 percent of minimum-wage earners and those above twenty-five amounted to 22.8 percent respectively; families with income 200 percent above the poverty line were 64.7 percent and 44.8 percent respectively; and those with a high-school degree comprised 20.9 and 38.5 percent of those groups respectively (Henderman, Jr. & Sherk, 2006). In short, these statistics do not suggest that most minimum-wage earners are the young and upwardly mobile group that the Heritage Foundation claims.

Barbara Ehrenreich, an advocate of low-income workers with a PhD in biology, worked at several jobs paying minimum wage as a kind of social experiment. She made every effort to display the qualities that work-for-welfare programs teach: "punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, obedience" (2001, p. 196). She concluded that her "track record in the survival department [was] far less admirable than [her] performance as a jobholder" (2001, p. 196) and expressed concern about the degree to which she was required to sacrifice her "basic civil rights . . . and self-respect" due to random drug tests and searches of her purse aimed at preventing theft (p. 208-209). The odds of receiving a promotion at those jobs was diminished by management's tendency to strictly measure past performance and hold minimum-wage earners to that level. In other words, employees were motivated to only meet average levels of performance (2001, p. 195). Newman (2006) similarly notes that it often requires movement through several jobs paying minimum wage in order to find one in which promotion is possible.

International Approaches. Many European countries do not have a minimum wage. Rather, wages are negotiated by unions and through collective bargaining agreements. A minimum wage was not established in Britain until 1999. Many relatively recent British efforts to reduce poverty are largely based on American models, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. Those tax credits in Britain, however, are available to larger segments of the working-class population. Despite the relative success of relieving poverty at the lowest-earning levels of society and a relatively low rate of unemployment in Britain, much of the evidence suggests that the issue of poverty has only been minimized rather than resolved. The presence of an "underclass," in other words, remains constant even in many of the most prosperous Western nations (Gertner, 2006; Krugman, 2006).

Australia, Japan, and most European countries have incorporated more vocational training into high-school curriculum than the United States. The so-called "college delusion" refers to the idea that everyone should get a post-secondary degree and has been proffered in explanation of how fewer Americans could end up performing low-skilled and low-paying work (Shipler, 2004, p. 293). However, every year in college is predictive of greater earning potential even if a degree is not completed (Newman, 2006, p. 276).

Terms & Concepts

Card-Krueger Thesis: David Card and Alan B. Krueger largely overturned the conventional logic about supply and demand in the low-skilled labor market in providing evidence supporting the conclusion that substantial increases to the minimum wage in the late 1980s did not result in increased unemployment among workers who earned roughly the minimum wage.

Fair Minimum Wage Act: The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 was an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the minimum wage at the federal level. The 2007 amendment included about $5 billion in tax cuts over a ten-year period for businesses likely to be affected by the minimum wage hike.

Living Wage: A living wage, which generally only applies to workers holding jobs with state contractors, is intended to account for the localized cost of living for an individual. It is usually much higher in large urban areas than in rural areas. About a hundred years ago unions argued for a similar standard of pay under the term "family wage."

Poverty Line: According to Health and Human Resources, the federal poverty threshold in 2012 was $11,945 for a single person and $ 23,283 for a family of four (US Census Bureau2013). The federal poverty line is meant to denote the minimal income required to maintain a tolerable existence.

Prevailing Wage: A prevailing wage is the norm of pay on average in an a specific industry.

Real Wages: Terms like "real wages" and "real income" reflect the relationship of income to inflation. Inflation tends to be about 3 percent a year, and yet the federal minimum wage remained at $5.15 an hour between 1997 and 2006.

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Newman, K.S. (2006). Chutes and ladders: Navigating the low-wage labor market. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Porter, E. (2007, February 4). Revisiting a minimum wage axiom. The New York Times. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/business/yourmoney/04view.html

Prasch, R.E. & Sheth, F.A. (1999). The economics and ethics of minimum wage legislation. Review of Social Economy, 57, 466-487. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=2609279&site=ehost-live

Rocheteau, G. & Tasci, M. (2007, May 1). The minimum wage and the labor market. Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland: Economic Commentary. Retrieved June 10, 2008 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi%5fqa5294/is%5f200705/ai%5fn21251555/pg%5f1 or http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi%5fqa5294/is%5f200705/ai%5fn21251555/prin nt

Shepherd, A. R. (2000). Minimum wages the Card-Krueger paradox. Southern Economic Journal, 67, 469-478. Retrieved June 10, 2008 from EBSCO online database, Business Source Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=3764937&site=ehost-live

Shipler, D.K. (2004). The working poor: Invisible in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Simon, K. I., & Kaestner, R. (2004). Do minimum wages affect non-wage job attributes? Evidence on fringe benefits. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 58, 52-70. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=14596166&site=ehost-live

Uchitelle, L. (2006, December 20). Raising the floor on pay. The New York Times. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/business/20minwage.html?sq=Raising%20t the%20floor%20on%20pay&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=123 32730176-//fQxp6TG0ezmYnTo38BJg

US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2013). Characteristics of minimum wage workers: 2012. Washington, DC: US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012.htm

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Wolfson, P. J. & Belman, D. (2003). The minimum wage: consequences for prices and quantities in low-wage labor markets. Tuck School of Business Working Paper No. 03-20. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=406640

Suggested Reading

Abdulahad, F., & Guirguis, H.S. (2003). The living wage and the effects of real minimum wages on part-time and teen-employment. Employee Responsibilities & Rights Journal, 15, 1-9. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=9564985&site=ehost-live

Adams, S., & Neumark, D. (2003). Living wage effects: New and improved evidence. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Card, D. (1992). Using regional variation in wages to measure the effects of the federal minimum wage. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 46, 22-37. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=9301271052&site=ehost-live

Cordero, R.A. (2000). Morality and the minimum wage. Journal of Social Philosophy, 31, 207-222. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=5407561&site=ehost-live

Devinatz, V. (2013). The significance of the living wage for us workers in the early twenty-first century. Employee Responsibilities & Rights Journal, 25, 125–134. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from EBSCO online database, SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=87390576&site=ehost-live

Lang, K. & Kahn. S. (1998). The effect of minimum wage laws on the distribution of employment. Journal of Public Economics 69, 67-82.

Maag, E. (2007) Tax credits, the minimum wage, and inflation. Tax Policy Issues and Options, . Retrieve June 16, 2008 from Urban Institute http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/311401%5fMinimum%5fWage.pdf

Neumark, D., & Wascher, W. (2007). Minimum wages, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and employment: Evidence from the post-welfare reform era. IZA Discussion Paper No. 2610. Available at SSRN: http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=969377

Palda, F. (2000). Some deadweight losses from the minimum wage: The cases of full and partial compliance. Labour Economics, 7, 751-783.

Sabia, J.J. (2006). The effect of minimum wage increases retail and small business employment. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from Employment Policies Institute. http://www.epionline.org/study%5fdetail.cfm?sid=98

Sabia, J. J., Burkhauser, R. V., & Hansen, B. (2012). Are the Effects of Minimum Wage Increases Always Small? New Evidence from a Case Study of New York State. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 65, 350-376. Retrieved December 15, 2014, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=76514307

Skidmore, P. (1999). Enforcing the minimum wage. Journal of Law & Society, 26 , 427-449. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=3252338&site=ehost-live

Trejo, S.J. (1998). Immigrant participation in low-wage labor markets. Working Paper Series. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=145589

Weil, D. (2003). Compliance with the minimum wage: Can government make a difference? Retrieved June 18, 2008 from SSRN. http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=368340

Weil, D. (2005). Public enforcement/private monitoring: Evaluating a new approach to regulating the minimum wage. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 58 , 238-257. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=15284808&site=ehost-live