A Half Century (and Counting) of Devaluing Minimum Wage Work in the United States

All observations prior to 2021 come from Dr. Dean Baker's corrected (March 2022) estimates, which he reports in 2020$. This graph converts those estimates into 2023$ using the BLS CPI-U. Observations for 2021, 2022, and 2023 were generated by the Cornell ILR Co-Lab research team using respective year-over-year rates of change in nonfarm business sector labor productivity from the BLS. Note that Dr. Baker's original analyses relied on a slightly more sophisticated measure of changing labor productivity. The choice here to use publicly available BLS measures of year-over-year change in labor productivity to generate post-2020 estimates was made for simplicity.
Chart: @RustBeltGeoSource: Dean Baker (for observations prior to 2021); BLS Major Sector Quarterly Labor Productivity and Costs (for Cornell ILR Co-Lab productivity-adjusted estimates for 2021-23); BLS CPI and CPI-U (for adjusting all figures to 2023$)Get the dataCreated with Datawrapper