information for practice

Minimum wage laws remain a subject of considerable debate at all levels of government despite years of research on their costs and benefits. At the national level, there have been frequent proposals in recent years to increase the federal minimum wage. Many states have followed suit, attempting (and sometimes succeeding) to raise their minimum wages above the federal level. At the present time, 21 states and the District of Columbia have minimum wages that exceed the federal wage floor, while 6 others recently passed ballot initiatives to raise theirs as well. Additionally, city-wide minimum wages have been enacted in a handful of cities, and living wages which typically set a higher minimum wage for a subset of workers in an area have spread to scores of other cities. A major drawback of much of the existing minimum wage research is that it was performed using data that extends through the mid-1990s at the latest. Since then, the low-wage labor market has undergone substantial changes.