On Monday, the New York Times reported on the growing groundswell to raise wages for the lowest-paid workers by increasing minimum wage rates. Legislators in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois are all looking toward raising their state minimums. At the same time, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin has introduced a bill that—among making other critical investments, strengthening worker protections, increasing tax fairness, and reducing the federal deficit—would raise the federal minimum wage to $9.80 per hour over three years and then index it to inflation.

As Table 1 shows, increasing the federal minimum wage in three steps to $9.80 per hour, as described in the Harkin bill, would raise the wages of 28 million Americans. About 19.5 million workers whose wages are between the current minimum and the proposed $9.80 rate would be directly affected. Another 8.9 million whose wages are just above the proposed minimum would also see a pay increase through “spillover” effects as employers adjust their overall pay scales.

Table 2 highlights some demographic characteristics of the affected workers. Fifty-four percent are women and 54 percent work full-time. The overwhelming majority (87.9 percent) are at least 20 years old. This may come as a surprise to some, as minimum-wage workers are often portrayed as teenagers working part-time. The reality is that only 12 percent of those who would be affected by the raise are teenagers and only 15 percent work fewer than 20 hours per week.

Furthermore, low-wage workers tend to spend rather than save an additional dollar earned, often because they have little other choice. The additional  household consumption generated by this boost to low-wage workers’ paychecks would benefit the labor market as a whole, because  the resulting economic activity translates into job growth. After controlling for a reduction in corporate profits resulting from the minimum wage increase, and assuming some of the business expense of paying higher wages is passed on to consumers, the net effect of the proposed minimum wage increase is an increase in economic activity of over $25 billion over the next three years, which would generate roughly 100,000 new jobs.

In a historical context, the increase proposed by the Harkin bill is long overdue. As John Schmitt and Janelle Jones at the Center for Economic and Policy Research explain, the real value of the minimum wage is far below its historical levels, despite the fact that the low-wage workforce is older and better educated than ever before. Congress has had to raise the minimum wage 17 times since its peak value in 1968 in order to combat inflation. Indexing the minimum wage, as 10 states have already done, would fix this problem once and for all.

The lingering effects of the recession make this an even more critical time to raise the wage floor. Even as employment has slowly picked up in the recovery, wage growth is still painfully weak. Moreover, recent reports show that low-wage work has been driving much of the recent job growth. (This also means that the figures here may actually understate the number of people who would be affected by an increase in the federal minimum.)  The Harkin bill, and similar state proposals, would give much-needed help to these workers and provide additional stimulus to the U.S. economy – all without costing anything to taxpayers.