Personally, I think the minimum wage should be abolished and a living wage implemented. The term minimum seems to cause a lot of debate about the idea of the wage or a bargaining system like many of the European states have.
A living wage should be able to pay rent, own a basic car, have health insurance, etc. As such it would be regionally adjusted to guarantee a basic standard of living.
The idea of a national minimum wage is just silly since the cost of living varies so much regionally. It ends up screwing people in areas where the cost is higher.
The minimum wage was intended to be a living wage.
The fact that you just tried to make a distinction between the two shows how far we’ve fallen.
Minimum wage was never intended to be a living wage. In its inception in 1938 minimum wage was $0.25 an hour. Here are things that could be purchased for 25 cents in 1938. A gallon of milk, 8 postage stamps, a matenee movie ticket, 2 gallons of gas, … Rent was half a months wages. Minimum wage was never a living wage.
never INTENDED to be a living wage
FACTUALLY FALSE
“Franklin Roosevelt’s Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act,” dated June 16 1933.
The law I have just signed was passed to put people back to work, to let them buy more of the products of farms and factories and start our business at a living rate again. This task is in two stages; first, to get many hundreds of thousands of the unemployed back on the payroll by snowfall and, second, to plan for a better future for the longer pull. While we shall not neglect the second, the first stage is an emergency job. It has the right of way.
The second part of the Act gives employment through a vast program of public works. Our studies show that we should be able to hire many men at once and to step up to about a million new jobs by October 1st, and a much greater number later. We must put at the head of our list those works which are fully ready to start now. Our first purpose is to create employment as fast as we can, but we should not pour money into unproved projects.
We have worked out our plans for action. Some of the work will start tomorrow. I am making available $400,000,000 for State roads under regulations which I have just signed, and I am told that the States will get this work under way at once. I have also just released over $200,000,000 for the Navy to start building ships under the London Treaty.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. 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.
Minimum wage was never intended to be a living wage.
It absolutely was, and more.
https://www.minimum-wage.org/articles/history
As part of the FLSA, the minimum wage was enacted at $0.25/hr to maintain a “minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being, without substantially curtailing employment”.
FLSA also largely-restricted child labor and established an hourly work ceiling (overtime).
Better luck next time, Jimbo.