3. Federal laws matter more than hard work.
When the federal minimum wage does not rise, it depresses the wage floor, and impacts Black women workers. It’s been stuck for 12 years.
The wage has been $7.25 an hour ($290 a week) for over a decade; in that time, all costs of living have climbed. Black women are disproportionately represented in low- and minimum-wage jobs.
A bump to $15 would immediately decrease the pay gap by gender and race, lift millions of families out of poverty, reduce hunger and food insecurity, and strengthen our economy. (For more on the impact of the minimum wage, see Oxfam’s interactive map.)
The federal tipped wage
The tipped work force is disproportionately Black and brown women; and the subminimum wage has been $2.13 an hour for 30 years.
The first minimum wage law excluded restaurant workers; when the tipped wage was created in 1966, it formalized the idea of the “subminimum,” and created a dangerous dynamic for servers.
Before the pandemic, Black women restaurant workers earned on average nearly $5 an hour less than white male counterparts. This reflects both the fact that they are segregated into more casual restaurants, as well as customer bias in tipping.
Millions of workers are excluded from federal labor protections
When federal labor laws were passed (especially the NLRA and FLSA in the 1930s), they deliberately excluded certain workforces--especially farmworkers and domestic workers—in large part to get support from Southern lawmakers. Not surprisingly, most of these workers were and are people of color; and a substantial number are Black women.
To this day, domestic workers are excluded from overtime pay and protections around minimum wages; and most lack protections around sexual harassment or workplace safety. (Read more on Oxfam’s blog.)
The pandemic hit Black women hard
On top (and as a result) of all these realities is the fact that when economic crises strike, Black women often feel the sharpest blow.
Half a million Black women lost their jobs in 2020, according to the Department of Labor; by percentage, the losses were nearly double those of white women and men over the same period.
Moreover, Black women who kept their jobs are overrepresented in frontline occupations that are experiencing the greatest dangers of exposure to the virus (such as cashiers, teachers, cleaners, healthcare aides).
It took ten years for Black women to recover from the Great Recession in terms of employment; now, they are practically back to where they started when the bottom dropped out of our economy.
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August 03, 2021 at 08:27PM
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Why are Black women working so hard, and being paid so much less? And what can we do about it? - Oxfam America
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