Dec 9, 2018
Minimum wage hikes have earned workers $68 billion per year since 2012
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A new report from the National Employment Law Project does a deep quantitative dive into the various minimum-wage laws that have been passed in recent years. Every percentage point that the minimum wage goes up corresponds to an overall pay rise for workers earning less than the new minimum. NELP put that pay rise into dollar terms, showing the biggest raises in California ($22 billion) and New York ($16 billion).
The bottom line: 22 million low-wage workers have won $68 billion in annual raises since 2012. That's 14 times the raise that all Americans received the last time the federal minimum wage was raised, in 2007.
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