Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.
Across the South and the rest of the country, workers and their advocates have been fighting for a $15 an hour minimum wage, more than double the current federal minimum wage of $7.25. But a new report finds that in many states $15 an hour is not a living wage for a single person, let alone a family.
Since 1999, the Alliance for a Just Society has issued an annual report calculating what it costs to make ends meet for households in selected states. This is the first year the report includes a living wage for all 50 states. It defines a living wage as the amount a full-time worker needs to be paid to make ends meet, including being able to set money aside for savings and emergencies.
The report, titled “Pay Up! Long Hours and Low Pay Leave Workers at a Loss,” finds that $15 an hour is not a living wage in 35 states and Washington, D.C. Based on a weighted average of living wages across the country, the national living wage for a single adult is actually $16.87 per hour.
“A wage that keeps families trapped in poverty and despair, no matter how hard or how many hours they work, is a national crisis,” says Jill Reese, the Alliance’s associate director. “We know that it’s not unheard of in our country that someone is working full time and is still homeless – this is unacceptable.”
Among the report’s other findings:
- The state with the lowest living wage is Arkansas, at $14.26 an hour. Other states with living wages less than $15 an hour (those in the South bolded) are Idaho ($14.51), Iowa ($14.69), Kansas ($14.97), Kentucky ($14.62), Mississippi ($14.96), Missouri ($14.95), Montana ($14.36), Nebraska ($14.60), North Dakota ($14.61), Ohio ($14.50), Oklahoma ($14.52), South Dakota ($14.32), Tennessee ($14.79), West Virginia ($14.44) and Wyoming ($14.71).
- The state with the highest living wage for a single adult is Hawaii at $21.44 followed by Maryland at $20.27. The Southern states with the highest living wages are Virginia at $18.70, Florida at $17.11 and Georgia at $16.27.
- Nowhere in the country can a family with two children and two working parents make ends meet if each working parent is paid less $17.85 per hour. In most of the country, it costs even more.
The report offers a number of recommendations for ensuring greater financial stability for low-paid workers. They include increasing the federal minimum wage to a living wage, eliminating the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, supporting unions and collective bargaining, establishing work supports like paid sick days, strengthening and enforcing equal opportunity laws, investing in state and federal safety net programs, and investing in living wage jobs.
“Working full-time should ensure financial stability,” the report concludes. “To make that happen, it’s time to move beyond $15 per hour.”
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.