A full-time worker earning minimum wage in Pennsylvania grosses $15,000 a year.

That’s poverty for any employee supporting more than just themselves.

For individuals, the $7.25 minimum hourly pay barely lifts them out of the ranks of the officially impoverished.

In any discussion of raising the minimum wage, at least one opponent argues these workers aren’t family bread-winners — they’re high-schoolers and college students trying to make a few extra bucks.

To which we say: If someone is working a full-time job for $7.25 an hour, they’re doing it because they have to.

They’re not doing it for pocket change, although that’s what they’re bringing home.

In 2013, about 42 percent of all minimum wage-earners in Pennsylvania were age 25 or older. Nearly 18 percent were married, and 19 percent were parents.

Pennsylvania last raised its minimum wage in 2009, when it matched the new, $7.25 federal minimum, and it’s time to do it again.

We support a state bill, endorsed by Gov. Tom Wolf on Tuesday, to boost the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over two years.

That’s where President Obama wants to see the federal minimum wage — he used his executive authority last year to pay new federal contract workers that rate — but he faces a tough sell in Congress.

Other states aren’t waiting for the feds to force their hands and are taking it upon themselves to see that their residents earn a living wage.

Twenty-nine states — including all of our neighbors — have minimum wages higher than the national minimum.

Wolf actually pledged to make raising the minimum wage a priority this legislative session, but he, too, needs the support of a Republican-controlled legislature to make that happen.

There are signs, though, the two sides can find common ground.

State Sen. Scott Wagner, R-Spring Garden Twp., late last month offered his own, more modest proposal.

Under his plan, the minimum wage would increase 50 cents each year over three years until it reaches $8.75 an hour. He would carve out an exception for minimum wage workers 18 and younger, who would continue to earn $7.25 an hour.

Wagner was criticized by some, who said his plan was nothing more than an attempt to undermine efforts to raise the rate to $10.10 an hour.

We would much rather see the higher figure become the standard and believe it would provide more help to more people.

But the fact is, whatever one imagines Wagner’s motives to be , he is bringing something to the table.

And that’s better than an empty chair for proponents of a minimum wage hike.