A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can legally pay their employees—the price floor below which employees may not sell their labor. Most countries had introduced minimum wage legislation by the end of the 20th century. Because minimum wages increase the cost of labor, companies often try to avoid minimum wage laws by using gig workers, by moving labor to locations with lower or nonexistent minimum wages, or by automating job functions.
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.
David Edward Card is a Canadian-American labour economist and professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", with Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens jointly awarded the other half.
Alan Bennett Krueger was an American economist who was the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, nominated by President Barack Obama, from May 2009 to October 2010, when he returned to Princeton. He was nominated in 2011 by Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and served in that office from November 2011 to August 2013. He was among the 50 highest ranked economists in the world according to Research Papers in Economics.
In the United States, the minimum wage is set by U.S. labor law and a range of state and local laws. The first federal minimum wage was instituted in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but later found to be unconstitutional. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established it at $0.25 an hour. Its purchasing power peaked in 1968, at $1.60. Since 2009, it has been $7.25 per hour.
In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from.
William Edward Spriggs is an American economist who worked as chair of the Howard University Department of Economics from 2005 to 2009 and assistant secretary of labor for policy from 2009 to 2012. He is also a professor of economics at Howard University and chief economist for the AFL-CIO.
The Employment Policies Institute is a fiscally conservative, non-profit American think tank that conducts and publishes research on employment issues, particularly aimed towards reducing the minimum wage. It was established in 1991 by Richard Berman, and it has been described as "a nonprofit research group that studies issues of entry-level employment."
David M. Gordon was an American economist and Professor of Economics at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. He founded the Institute for Labor Education and Research in 1975 and later the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis in New York City. Gordon worked to disseminate progressive economic ideas to the general public and to contribute to the development of a left-political movement in the United States. Gordon's work dealt mainly with discrimination and labor market segmentation. He coined the term social structure of accumulation which gave rise to an extensive body of work on the impact of political, social and economic institutions on long-term investment and growth.
Alan Manning is a British economist and professor of economics at the London School of Economics.
The Fight for $15 is an American political movement advocating for the minimum wage to be raised to USD$15 per hour. The federal minimum wage was last set at $7.25 per hour in 2009. The movement has involved strikes by child care, home healthcare, airport, gas station, convenience store, and fast food workers for increased wages and the right to form a labor union. The "Fight for $15" movement started in 2012, in response to workers' inability to cover their costs on such a low salary, as well as the stressful work conditions of many of the service jobs which pay the minimum wage.
The UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) is an interdisciplinary research unit within the College of Letters & Science, Division of Social Science, dedicated to research, teaching, and discussion of labor and employment issues. It was founded in 1945 as the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations. It is one of the two research programs in the University of California system along with the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The IRLE consists of four bodies: the IRLE Academic Unit, UCLA Labor Center, Human Resources Round Table, and the Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program.
Clair Brown is an American economist who is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Brown is a past Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. Brown has published research on many aspects of how economies function, including high-tech industries, development engineering, the standard of living, wage determination, poverty, and unemployment.
Enrico Moretti is an Italian economist and the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge), and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn). Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty in 2004, he has taught at UCLA.
Michael R. Strain is an American economist. He is currently the Director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and a columnist for Project Syndicate. Strain's research focuses on labor economics, macroeconomics, public finance, and social policy.
On the 1st May 2014 Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray announced plans to increase Seattle's minimum wage to $15 per hour incrementally over the next few years. Seattle was the first big city in the United States to raise its minimum wage to $15 after the rise of the "Fight for 15 movement". This policy decision resulted in Seattle having the highest minimum wage of any major city in the United States. Once Seattle raised its minimum wage many other major cities around the country also took action to increase the pay of low wage workers. There has been much debate over the effects the increases to the minimum wage have had on employment and overall economic conditions in Seattle. To determine the impacts of the policy a number of studies have been conducted; the most notable being research by the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley.
Patrick McGraw Kline is an U.S. American economist and Professor of Economics of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2018, his research was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize by the Society of Labor Economists for "outstanding contributions in the field of labor economics". In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious IZA Young Labor Economist Award.
Arindrajit (Arin) Dube is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, known internationally for his empirical research on the effects of minimum wage policies. He is among the foremost scholars regarding the economic impact of minimum wages. In 2019, he was asked by the UK Treasury to conduct a review of the evidence on the impact of minimum wages, which informed the decision to set the level of the National Living Wage. His work is focused on the economics of the labor market, including the role of imperfect competition, institutions, norms, and behavioral factors that affect wage setting and jobs.
Rhonda Michèle Williams was an American professor, activist and political economist whose work combined economics with multiple other social fields including race and gender analysis, law, politics, public policy and cultural studies. She aimed to show how the examination of the roles of race and gender in economics benefitted from an inclusive approach rather than a separate and fragmented analysis in order to ensure that issues of economic inequality and discrimination were aptly addressed. Williams was also noted as being consistent in aligning her own ethics with economic analysis resulting in a legacy in the political economy of race and gender.
Eric Baird French is the Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations and Labour Economics at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Co-Director at the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy, a Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research interests include: econometrics, labour and health economics.
