While it's true that very few people earn exactly the federal minimum wage, which is what your source is discussing, it's probably worth mentioning that "Curren

While it's true that very few people earn exactly the federal minimum wage, which is what your source is discussing, it's probably worth mentioning that "Currently, 29 states and D.C. have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour." [1] Saying that "very few people earn minimum wage" while referring to federal minimum wage statistics is not particularly informative - and even the statistics you cite are somewhat misleading, as they refer to people earning the federal minimum wage or less, although it's implied that those earning less are mostly tipped workers. It turns out to be somewhat difficult to find statistics for which fraction of workers earn their state's minimum wage or less; focusing just on California [2], it seems that at least 4%, or ~630,000, CA workers were earning at or below the CA minimum wage in 2017. In other words, the 1.3 million figure given as "the number of minimum wage workers" is almost certainly off by a large factor, once you take into account different minimum wages. [1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage-chart.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/state-min... [2] https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/data/oes-employment-and-wages.html; https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/data/oes-employment-a... the 630k figure comes from looking at the industries in the "State of California" summary sheet that have a "25th percentile" wage of 10.50 or less, then taking 25% of the workers in those industries to get a lower-bound estimate.