The Real Faces of the Minimum Wage

Minimum wage workers are adults.

Nearly 80 percent of the workers who would be directly affected by a minimum wage increase are adults, as seen in an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. When you include those who would be indirectly affected that figure becomes more than 92 percent.

Less than 16 percent of workers who would be affected by President Obama’s minimum-wage proposal are teenagers.

Minimum wage workers are parents.

Many of those workers are parents. More than seven million children — nearly one out of every 10 kids in the United States — have parents whose income would go up under a new minimum wage. When you count the parents whose wages would be indirectly affected, that rises to more than 11 million (or roughly one in six) children whose households would benefit from the increase.

Most minimum-wage workers are women.

That’s not something the right wants to emphasize. Other than formally declaring itself “anti-woman,” there’s not much more the GOP can do to lose the female vote. It certainly doesn’t want people to notice that this is one more policy that disproportionately harms women.