It is often said that economic equality will not eliminate racial or gender inequalities. That’s true, but it will certainly help with those parts of life affected by economics.
Take raising the minimum wage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of hourly workers (58.3% of all workers) in 2017, just 2% of men but 3% of women earned wages at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Just 2% of white, Asian or Hispanic workers, but 3% of black workers earned wages at or below the federal minimum wage. Even education is not a guarantee against low wages, although it helps; 1% of college graduates, 2% of high school graduates or those with some college and/or an associate’s degree, and 4% of those without a high school degree earned at or below the federal minimum wage. Those may seem like nicely low numbers until you realize they translate to 2.2 million American workers making minimum wage or below, some of them with college degrees, including about 700,000 making exactly minimum wage and 1.5 million making below minimum wage. That’s a lot of misery!
How do workers earn less than the minimum wage? By working in the service industries, especially restaurants and other food services. Tips may, of course, make up for some of this. Then again, they may not. It can be hard work to make enough tips for minimum wage, even in the rare case when tips are not pooled and shared with bussers, bartenders, and so on (interesting interactive graph at the link, where you can enter your state, average tip, etc., and see how long it will take a server to make minimum wage at different restaurant levels). Federal law requires restaurant owners to make up the difference if wages and tips add up to less than the state minimum wage, but owners often get away with underpaying, since someone has to complain and there has to be an investigation followed by orders for back pay. Meanwhile, employees struggle to pay the bills, and this doesn’t even cover living wages. And as columnists in this group have detailed in previous WoW columns, the lack of a minimum wage in the service industry leaves workers at risk of harassment by customers, with fear of speaking out endangering tips that are needed to support employees and their families.
Furthermore, let’s face it, $7.25 isn’t going to support an individual, much less a family, without a social safety net, which Reptublicans (cold-blooded reptilian Republicans) want to kill. If we aspire to at least $15 per hour, according to the National Employment Law Project, as of 2016 42% of all workers, almost 50% of women workers, more than 50% of black workers, and about 60% of Latino workers made less than $15 per hour. Thus raising the minimum wage to this threshold would benefit more than half of female and/or minority hourly workers. Median wages for 2015 were about $21 for white men, $15 for black men and $14 for Latino men, compared to $17 for white women, $13 for black women and $11 for Latina women. Note too that the jobs that are predicted to be the fastest-growing in the next 10 years are those that pay poorly.
Inequalities in net worth and accumulated wealth, of course, are even worse, as if you don’t have much, you don’t have anything to save and grow over time. For more details, you can download the full report here.