WASHINGTON, Jan. 5, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is the daily "Profile America" feature from the U.S. Census Bureau:
MINIMUM WAGE
Profile America — Thursday, January 5th. The business world was confronted with a new idea on this date in 1914. That's when Henry Ford announced that he would reduce the workday from nine to eight hours, and pay his factory assembly line workers a minimum wage of $5 a day, which is almost $121 in current dollars. The idea gained general acceptance, and in 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law a federally mandated minimum wage of 25 cents an hour. Currently, the federal hourly minimum wage is $7.25. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have rates over the federal minimum. There are over 78 million hourly workers in the U.S., 2.6 million of them paid at or below the minimum wage. Households in the bottom 20 percent of income earn no more than $22,800 per year. Profile America is in its 20th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sources:
Ford firsts/ accessed 11/1/2016: http://corporate.ford.com/company/history.html
Inflation adjustment/accessed 11/1/2016: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5&year1=1914&year2=2016
Initial and current minimum wages/accessed 11/1/2016: http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm
Hourly workers and minimum wage /accessed 11/1/2016: http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2015/home.htm
State data/ accessed 11/1/2016: http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage-chart.aspx
Household quintiles/Current Population Survey:
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/hinc-05/2016/hinc05.xls
Profile America is produced by the Center for New Media and Promotion of the U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics and accounts drawn from cited non-Census sources are employed for illustrative or narrative purposes, and are not attested to by the U.S. Census Bureau. These daily features are available as produced segments, ready to air, on the Internet at http://www.census.gov (look for "Audio" in the "Library" pull-down menu).
SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau
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