Meet the Workers Who Get Paid 25 Cents an Hour

Joe Biden isn't OK with that, but Donald Trump in all likelihood is.

It’s often forgotten that Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963 was billed not only as a march for freedom but as a “march for jobs and freedom. One of the marchers’ central demands was that the federal hourly minimum wage be increased from $1.25 to $2. Eleven years would pass before the federal minimum reached $2, by which time inflation had halved the value of that increase. King and his marchers secured two major anti-discrimination bills, but no great improvement in wages.

If we focus only on the minimum wage, those 1963 marchers had it better than we do today. The $1.25 hourly wage that they judged intolerable was the equivalent today of $12.85—yet the federal hourly minimum is a paltry $7.25. No president has increased the federal wage minimum since George W. Bush, who left office 15 years ago, and it seems unlikely Donald Trump will allow an increase during the next four years.

Disgraceful though the $7.25 minimum is, the Labor Department allows employers to pay mentally disabled workers $3.50 per hour or less. Some of these workers are paid as little as 25 cents per hour. President Joe Biden proposed this week that the disabled subminimum be abolished, a change that does not require legislation. But don’t hold your breath for Trump, who won a majority of working-class voters in the last election, to allow this proposed regulation to take effect. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.