The new year brings higher minimum wages in dozens of cities and states.

For Marketplace, I'm Nova Saffo and for David Brancaccio.

Millions of workers across the country are getting a raise today.

19 states are starting the new year by boosting their minimum wages.

Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzor has more on who's getting a pay hike

and why. More than a dozen states will be at $15 an hour or more by the end of this year.

47 cities and counties will also increase their minimum wages, according to a tally from the

Progressive Economic Policy Institute. at least schooled as a senior

economist there, she says more than 8 million workers will benefit from the higher minimums.

Those are disproportionately women, black and Hispanic workers, many of them are adults, not teenagers.

About half of minimum wage workers that are going to be affected live in households

with less than 200 percent of the poverty line income. In fact, Gould says for the first time,

there will be more workers living in states with a minimum wage of $15 or more than in states

still using the federal minimum wage, which she says has been stuck at 725 an hour since 2009.

That's over 15 years of a federal minimum wage that is just too low. In many states, the cost of

living to afford a decent center living is just simply out of reach for people at that wage.

They are living in poverty at that wage.

Gould says 20 states still use the federal minimum wage, but even the new higher state and local

minimums taking effect today won't solve our affordability problem, says Amy Glassmeier,

an economic geographer at MIT. We still have inflation that is present.

We still have high prices at present.

And we also have scarcity of certain goods which drive their price up.

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