[Excerpt] According to Current Population Survey estimates for 2003, some 72.9 million American workers were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.6 percent of all wage and salary workers. Of those paid by the hour, 545,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage, and another 1.6 million were reported with wages below the minimum. Together, these 2.1 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 2.9 percent of all hourly-paid workers. Tables 1 - 10 present data on a wide array of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics for these low-wage workers.