Since it was first instituted in 1938, the federal minimum wage
has established a floor for wages. While not every worker is
eligible, it provides a minimum of earnings for the lowest-paid
workers.
What are full-time annual earnings at the current minimum
wage
A minimum wage is the lowest wage that employers may legally pay
to workers. The first minimum wage law was enacted in 1894 in New
Zealand.
With the passage of The
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), the U.S.
minimum wage was initially set at $0.25 per hour for covered
workers. Since then, it has been raised 22 separate
times–most recently, in July 2009, to $7.25 an hour.
FSLA provided a number of federal protections for the first time
including
The Census Bureau reports poverty rates by work experience for
people ages 18 to 64. In 2014, the overall poverty rate for
people ages 18 to 64 was 14%.
The “working poor” are people who spend 27 weeks or more in a
year in the labor force either working or looking for work but
whose incomes fall below the poverty
level. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
about 9.5 million of people who spent at least 27 weeks in the
labor force were poor. That year, the working poor comprised 6.3
percent of all individuals in the labor force.
In 2014, about 1.3 million U.S. workers age 16 and over earned
exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Another 1.7 million had wages below the federal
minimum. Together these workers make up 4 percent of all
hourly paid workers.
