The U.S. Senate votes Wednesday on raising the minimum wage to $10.10, which may help lift a disproportionately high number of LGBT households out of poverty.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent some statistics compiled by their LGBT partners, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.
According to studies, a $10.10 minimum wage would mean higher earnings for 17 million workers with little to no effect on the employment rate, and could lift nearly five million Americans out of poverty.
While the perception is that the gay community is wealthy, raising the minimum wage will disproportionately help the LGBT households.
• Household income among trans people is four times as likely to be below $10,000 per year.
• While 5.7 percent of opposite-sex married couples live in poverty, 7.6 percent of lesbian couples live in poverty.
• Same-sex African-American couples have twice the poverty rate of opposite-sex African-American couples.
Over the past decade, studies have compared wages earned by gay and bisexual men compared to straight men. Taking into consideration education, occupation and region of the country, gay and bi men earn 10 to 32 percent less.
The Minimum Wage Fairness Act would:
• raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 by 2016, in three increments of 95 cents each
• adjust the minimum wage each following year to keep pace with the rising cost of living
• raise the minimum wage for tipped workers, which has been frozen at a $2.13 per hour for more than 20 years
