Hamburger-flipper minimum wage jobs are no longer entry-level jobs of teenagers with less than a high school education.
Increasingly, those jobs are held by the over 25 and college-educated.
Steven Greenhouse reports for The New York Times, March 16, 2014:
More than half of those who make $9 or less an hour are 25 or older, while the proportion who are teenagers has declined to just 17% from 28% in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, according to Janelle Jones and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research.
Today’s low-wage workers are also more educated, with 41% having at least some college, up from 29% in 2000. “Minimum-wage and low-wage workers are older and more educated than 10 or 20 years ago, yet they’re making wages below where they were 10 or 20 years ago after inflation,” said Mr. Schmitt, senior economist at the research center.
“If you look back several decades, workers near the minimum wage were more likely to be teenagers — that’s the stereotype people had. It’s definitely not accurate anymore.”
H/t Zero Hedge
See also “Nearly half of U.S. college graduates can find only low-wage jobs,”
~Eowyn
