Which Jobs Would Be Affected by a Federal $15 Minimum Wage?

With a new bill proposing to sharply raise the federal minimum wage headed to the Senate tomorrow and Los Angeles County recently joining San Francisco, Seattle and other cities in raising its minimum wage, the topic of a $15 minimum wage continues to make headlines. The minimum wage is designed to help low-wage workers. However, economists know there are drawbacks as well—in theory, higher minimum wages encourage companies to hire fewer workers. In practice, research shows small minimum wage hikes mostly help workers, but the negative side effects grow as the level of pay rises. While most of the focus of the $15 minimum wage debate has been on low-skilled retail and restaurant jobs, a minimum wage hike to $15 per hour would affect employees in nearly every industry.[1] To answer what types of jobs could be affected by a wage increase, we examined a large sample of Glassdoor salary reports from workers who report earning just below the proposed threshold—jobs that currently pay the equivalent of between $10 and $15 per hour. The table below shows the job titles most likely to be affected by a federal $15 minimum wage. Diversity of Jobs Affected Among jobs likely to be affected by a $15 minimum wage, a surprising number are management-style positions including grocery manager, store manager and office manager. Many semi-skilled positions such as machine operator, dental assistant and graphic designer could be affected, in addition to many jobs requiring bachelor’s degrees and other certifications such as teacher, lab technician and research analyst. These data illustrate how broadly a federal $15 minimum wage could be felt throughout the workforce. Today’s $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage—and state minimum wages ranging from $7.50 to $9.50 per hour[2]—largely impacts only the lowest-skilled retail and restaurant workers. But as the minimum wage rises to $15 per hour and beyond, the diversity of job titles affected grows rapidly. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as Glassdoor Economic Research takes a closer look at which industries and workers stand to be most affected by $15 minimum wage legislation. Footnotes: [1] Based on a sample of 121,552 salary reports submitted to Glassdoor between January 1, 2010 and April 1, 2015, for which total compensation was between $10 per hour (or $20,000 per year) and $15 per hour (or $30,000 per year). Reported salaries by job title represent median total pay, which includes base pay plus all other reported compensation (including tips, bonuses, commissions, etc.). All compensation is inflation-adjusted into 2015 dollars. Job titles with 30 or more salary reports are displayed. [2] A complete listing of state minimum wages is available from the U.S. Department of Labor at http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm.