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More than 40 percent of working single parents in the U.S. earn less than $17 an hour, new research shows, underscoring the extent of a crisis of low wages and rampant inequality.
The research, conducted by Oxfam, an organization dedicated to combating inequality and poverty around the world, found that across all demographics in the U.S., some 23 percent of workers currently earn low wages—defined as a wage of below $17 an hour.
Single parents who are raising children while also working in the paid labor market are particularly over-represented among low-wage earners, at 42 percent. Among partnered parents, only 12 percent earn less than $17 an hour.
The research also found that women of color are especially likely to earn low wages: 40 percent of Latina women, 35 percent of Black women, and 20 percent of Asian women earn less than $17 an hour, which—Oxfam concludes— reflects historic trends of occupational segregation and confirms long-standing patterns of gendered and racialized wage discrepancies.
“Low wage workers, who are disproportionately women of color, are the backbone of our economy. The least this country can do is pay them wages that cover basic necessities—something the current federal minimum wage does not do, regardless of where in the U.S. you live,” said Kaitlyn Henderson, a senior researcher at Oxfam America who authored the new research report.
“We’re talking about the childcare and domestic workers who care for our families, and the agricultural workers who help put food on our tables. But decades of occupational segregation have meant these jobs that employ majority women, immigrants, or people of color have been systemically underpaid and undervalued,” she added. “This needs to change.”
Regional Disparities
Some 20 states across the U.S. have so far failed to increase their minimum wages above the federal wage floor of $7.25 an hour, Oxfam points out. And there’s a strong correlation between states in which the minimum wage is relatively high and states in which the proportion of low wage earners is low.
The District of Columbia, for example, which is the place with the highest minimum wage in the country, also has the lowest proportion of low wage workers, with 8 percent of the workforce earning less than $17 an hour.
Mississippi, on the other hand, has one of the highest proportions of low wage workers in the country, at just under 34 percent of its total workforce. Mississippi has also retained the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Overall, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for a decade and a half, which is the longest the minimum wage has ever stagnated since it was established in the late 1930s. Adjusted for inflation, Oxfam notes, today’s federal minimum wage is the weakest it has been in over 60 years.
Trapped in Low Wages
One of the most pernicious problems of the prevalence of low-wage work, is that it’s hard to escape.
In an article published in the Harvard Business Review last year, Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice, and Manjari Raman, a senior researcher—both of Harvard Business School—wrote about research they’d done on the pay trajectory of 181,891 workers who started working in low-wage jobs in 2012.
Five years after starting those jobs, Fuller and Raman found that 60 percent of the workers were still stuck in such positions. “People who had managed to escape those jobs had most often done so by quitting industries such as hospitality, food services, and retail, which are classic low-wage traps,” they wrote, adding that across industries, women were overrepresented in low-wage jobs and most likely to stay impoverished.
Oxfam notes in its latest report that the detrimental impacts of federal minimum wage exemptions are particularly concerning. The federal sub-minimum tipped wage—which accounts for the fact that tips will bridge the difference between the sub-minimum and standard minimum wage—has been stuck at $2.13 for over three decades, Oxfam notes. The result of this is that more than half—or 53 percent— of all tipped wage workers earn less than $17 an hour, compared to 20 percent of the non-tipped wage workforce.
Against this backdrop, Oxfam has joined other advocacy groups in calling on Congress to pass the Raise the Wage Act to increase the federal minimum wage and eliminate exclusions in national minimum wage laws, including sub-minimum wages for tipped workers, youth, and workers with disabilities.
Analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute has found that raising the federal minimum wage to $17 by 2028 would impact 27,858,000 workers across the U.S., or about 19% of the workforce. EPI also found that the increases would provide an additional $86 billion annually in wages for the country’s lowest-paid workers. And the average affected worker who works year-round would receive an extra $3,100 per year.
