Pages

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Minimum Wage Increase Affects Oregonians in All Industries

Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industries announced on September 17 a minimum wage boost of $.15 per hour. This means workers earning the current minimum wage -- $9.10 per hour -- will make $9.25 per hour effective January 1, 2015. For an individual working at the current minimum wage, 30 hours per week year round, this will add an extra $234 to their annual pay.

We recently posted that roughly six percent of Oregon jobs made minimum wage in the first quarter of 2014. This amounted to about 103,400 jobs, 40 percent of which were in leisure and hospitality.

With the new 2015 minimum wage available, we made some new calculations. We found that about 141,800 jobs (or 8%) paid less than $9.25 per hour in the first quarter of 2014, meaning the $.15 increase in minimum wage would have affected them.

More than 55,000 jobs that paid less than $9.25 in the first quarter of 2014 were in leisure and hospitality. That's almost 28 percent of industry employment.
For more information about Oregon's minimum wage, check out the 2014 minimum wage summary written by Nick, our state employment economist.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does it seem that the number of workers making the minimum wage is dropping over time?

For example, in 1Q 2013 the number of workers in Oregon that made at or below the January 2014 minimum wage was 149,700.

Then fast forward and that number drops to 141,800 for workers in 1Q 2014 making at or below the January 2015 minimum wage.

Gail Krumenauer said...

That's a great question. Several months ago we took a look at minimum wage jobs over the years. We found that minimum wage jobs have remained a fairly stable share of all jobs in Oregon (between about 4% and 6%). Here's a link to that post (it's the bottom half) if you're interested in more details: http://oregonemployment.blogspot.com/2014/01/us-employment-and-oregons-minimum-wage.html