Minimum Wage

No one working full time should live in poverty

Washington State's innovative minimum wage law preserves buying power for low-wage workers by indexing increases to the rate of inflation. Today, a full-time worker earning minimum wage in Washington earns about $17,784 annually (at 2080 hours/year) - $4,160 more than workers in states with the federal minimum wage. Those added wages are plowed right back into the local economy.

A strong minimum wage also helps Washington's economy. The annual cost of living adjustments have no significant impact on employment overall, nor in the two largest employers of minimum wage workers: retail and restaurants. Washington's law also provide employers, who know well in advance the amount of the modest annual increases, with predictability, rather than facing occasional big jumps that result from a partisan political process.

But not every state has a voter-approved strong minimum wage law. Currently, a typical no-frills basic family budget (see this Basic Family Budget Calculator) for a family with one parent and two children is $40,273 a year, about three times the income of a full-time worker making the current minimum wage. It takes an act of Congress, and often years of waiting, for some workers to simply get a cost of living adjustment, much less a raise.

Featured Publications

Issue Guide on the Minimum Wage

07.21.2009 | Economic Policy Institute | Provides an accessible overview that includes data on how many people are affected state-by-state, along with information about trends on the minimum wage’s value over time, and other clear, research-based answers to key questions and issues in the national debate over minimum wage policy.

Still Working Well: Washington's Minimum Wage and the Beginnings of Economic Recovery

01.02.2004 | Critics of Washington's groundbreaking minimum wage law have repeatedly pointed to our state's relatively high minimum wage as a cause of our higher than average unemployment rate. However, the data do not support a causal connection. Key Findings » Full Report »

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Policy Impact

"We’re paying the highest wage we’ve ever had to pay, and our business is still up more than 11 percent over last year," said Tom Singleton, manager of a Papa Murphy’s in Liberty Lake, WA.

Read Tom's story (NYT) »

Policy Success

In 1998, EOI joined dozens of organizations and businesses to support Initiative 688, which boosted the state’s minimum wage and implemented a automatic cost-of-living adjustment.