Russ Roberts at

Cafe Hayek

says that his students typically think that about 20% of the American labor force is employed at the minimum wage, when the actual percentage of minimum wage workers (1.7 million) was only 2.2% of all hourly-paid workers (76.5 million) in 2006,

according to the BLS

.

However, hourly-paid workers (76.5 million) in the 2006 BLS study are only about half of the total labor force of about 146 million, and therefore minimum wage workers represent fewer than 1.2% of all workers (not just hourly workers). In other words, only about 1 out of every 86 American workers receives the minimum wage.