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Most voters support a minimum-wage hike to at least $10 an hour — that's now looking very unlikely
(President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Andrew Puzder to lead the Department of Labor.Jack Plunkett/AP Images for Carl's Jr.)
A solid majority of American voters support raising the federal minimum wage to at least $10 an hour, according to a recent survey of registered voters conducted by Public Policy Polling.
The poll found that 76% of registered voters supported raising the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour. Twenty-nine percent of those polled supported raising it to $15.
More than half (54%) of people who voted for President-elect Donald Trump support giving the lowest-paid workers in the nation a raise to at least $10 an hour.
The federal minimum wage today stands at $7.25 an hour. That number hasn't budged since 2009. Millions of minimum-wage workers rely on federal assistance programs to make ends meet. As the chart below shows, the minimum wage is not enough to keep workers out of poverty:
According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 would give more than one in four American workers a raise.
But it's looking less likely that this will happen anytime soon. On Thursday, Trump chose Andrew Puzder, the CEO of the parent company of the fast-food chains Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, to lead the Department of Labor.
Puzder opposes the pro-labor regulations that were ushered in under President Barack Obama, including a rule designed to make millions of workers newly eligible for overtime pay. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2014 that Obama's efforts to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would raise unemployment. Republicans, who control Congress, have rejected numerous attempts to raise the minimum wage at the federal level, stating that wage issues should be "handled at the state and local level."
Many states and local governments have already taken it upon themselves to raise wages. California and New York have plans in place to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next few years. In November, voters in Arizona, Maine, Colorado, and Washington approved ballot measures that will hike wages to at least $12 an hour by 2020.
But a handful of states don't have minimum-wage laws of their own and therefore rely on the federal minimum wage to set a pay floor. Numerous other states have minimum wages that are equal to the federal rate of $7.25 an hour.
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