Marketplace: 15 Years Later, the Federal Minimum Wage Is Still $7.25 an Hour

The $7.25 federal minimum wage turned 15 years old Wednesday. That is the longest the minimum wage has gone without getting a raise.

When you adjust for inflation, the $7.25 minimum wage has the lowest purchasing power since 1949. And yet, there is not much talk, in Congress or otherwise, about increasing it.

Over the past decade, Congress has debated raising the minimum wage. In fact, the Raise the Wage Act was reintroduced in the Senate last year. But the idea keeps going nowhere. Why? The short answer is congressional gridlock.

“We are in an unprecedented situation in terms of Congress just not taking steps to raise the wage floor,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. She’d like the minimum wage to at least double, in part because Black workers and women are way more likely to hold those jobs.

“It’s such a common sense solution to so many of the issues facing working people,” she said, pointing to issues like the racial wealth gap and gender pay disparity.

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Read and listen to the full story at marketplace.org.