Philadelphia’s minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 – here’s why efforts to raise it have failed

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Michael O'Bryan, Drexel University and Alicia Atkinson, Drexel University

(THE CONVERSATION) In Philadelphia, the poorest big city in the U.S., the minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 per hour for the past 15 years. That’s the minimum wage everywhere in Pennsylvania, and it matches the federal minimum wage. However, minimum wage workers in other big American cities earn significantly more: $16 an hour in New York and $15 an hour in Boston, for example.

If Philadelphia’s $7.25-per-hour minimum wage were to keep up with inflation alone, it would need to be raised to at least $10.38 today, according to the federal Consumer Price Index inflation calculator.

We asked Michael O’Bryan, founder of the Wealth and Work Futures Lab at Drexel University’s Lindy Institute for Urban...