Let's Talk About the Minimum Wage

It is, genuinely, supposed to be about the minimum required to survive

If you work, you should be paid enough to live. That’s what the deal is. No take-backsies. | Photo by Emil Kalibradov on Unsplash

There’s a really weird idea in some people’s heads these days. They think that the minimum wage shouldn’t be a living wage. That minimum wage workers should be grateful to make any amount they’re given, and that if you want to survive on your work income, you need to make an effort to get a better job.

Raising the minimum wage is a non-starter to these people, even as the cost of living skyrockets and the average rate of debt is off the charts.

I’ll let you take a second to think about the mental gymnastics inherent in that.

Quick history lesson — the idea of a minimum wage first appeared in 1894 when New Zealand, or Aotearoa as we really ought to call it, realized that a staggering number of sweatshops and other forms of slavery were popping up all over the place in shoddy economic conditions.

They realized the best way to curb such exploitation of the desperate masses was to… y’know. Make the masses less desperate.

By instituting a legal minimum wage, they forced workplaces to pay their workers appropriately for the labour they were performing, and that helped reduce extreme poverty in the country. At least for some, it’s important to note that this was 1894, and so marginalized communities still got the short end of the stick concerning pay and workplace protections.

The author of the bill that introduced the minimum wage, William Pember Reeves, understood that protecting labour rights and unions was a surefire way to help reduce riots and cut down the chances of small-scale wars, such as were happening in the Appalachian regions of the U.S.

The Coal Wars lasted from 1890 to 1930, because it took that long for the U.S. government to realize that shooting striking workers is not an effective way to calm down angry working men who also had guns.

Fun fact, 1894 is also the year that both Canada and the U.S. signed Labour Day into law as a holiday. These events are all related, if you couldn’t tell.

See, the mistake some people make is to hear ‘minimum’ and assume that the minimum wage is the bare minimum that a company is required to pay.

The issue is, they misunderstand what that means. It is, in fact, the bare minimum a company is required by law to pay. Because if they could get away with it, the greedy fucks would pay you even less.

The federal minimum wage in the U.S. was put in place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the Fair Labour Standards Act of 1938. That was part of a whole slate of protections against exploitation, including a cap on working hours and child labour protections.

Now, I’ve ranted about the wonderful things FDR did during his term concerning the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Hat’s off to him, he saved both of our countries with his overhauls.

He also did some seriously fucked up things, like introducing Redlining and the Japanese Internment Camps. But I digress.

His stated goal with the minimum wage was laid out in this direct quote from the man himself:

“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By ‘business’ I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of decent living.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

The purpose, therefore, is very clear. The minimum wage was, indeed, intended to be a living wage. More than the bare minimum to satisfy the law, but intended to provide a decent living to all workers regardless of class.

Do you think it lives up to that lofty ideal these days? Food for thought.

Solidarity wins.

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