What is a Living Wage?

 

 

A living wage is the MINIMUM amount that a worker must earn to afford his or her basic necessities, without public or private assistance. In short, a living wage is a more just, minimum wage.  Anyone working 40 hours in a week should be able to afford the bare necessities of civilized life: food, clothing, shelter, including utilities, and transportation to and from work. That is not a lot to ask, and the employers who benefit from the workers’ labor ought to pay them enough to live on without resorting to public assistance.

Why isn’t Minimum Wage Enough?  The federal minimum wage was enacted through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which purpose was to eliminate “labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being of workers.” Despite these intentions, the federal minimum wage has failed to keep up with the rising cost of living, and has instead become a wage that keeps working people in poverty.  Although the dollar amount (nominal value) of minimum wage has increased over time, it now takes more dollars to purchase the same goods and services, so the real value of minimum wage has actually decreased since 1960.

 Today, millions of working people struggle to cover the cost of housing, food, health care, childcare and other basic necessities for themselves and their families. A worker who is paid the minimum wage of $7.25/hour, or any wage below a living wage, cannot possibly afford basic necessities without assistance. This creates problems not only for workers, but for businesses and the local economy. The living wage movement is an important initiative that can bring improve conditions for working people, businesses and our local economy.

 

 

Without a living wage workers may be compelled to

• work excessive overtime hours or multiple jobs
• become bonded labourers
• put their children into work instead of school
• be denied their basic human rights to food, shelter, nutrition, health, housing and education and suffer social deprivations such as being unable to take part in cultural events
• be unable to withstand crises such as ill health.

 The median necessary living wage across the entire US is $67,690. The state with the lowest annual living wage is Mississippi, with $58,321. The state with the highest living wage is Hawaii, with $136,437. Other expensive states (unsurprisingly) included New York and California, which have notoriously high costs of living and expensive housing markets.

 There are two common misconceptions about low-wage work. One is that they’re mostly young people who are going to, as they get more experience or graduate from college or high school, move on as a matter of course.  The truth is most low-wage workers are not young.  The other common misconception is that low-wage work is temporary — that you can easily move up. And any low-wage worker can tell you this is not true.  This is particularly true if you don’t have a college degree. If you’re a person with relatively low levels of education, your chances of upward mobility are really, really limited. 

While wealthy Americans have weathered the lockdown just fine for these last few months, millions of workers across the country face a current and pending economic crisis thanks to structural barriers to wealth and livable wages. It’s a crisis that predates Covid-19, but has been compounded because of the pandemic.

It’s a crisis of income. The reality of joblessness or a drastic reduction in paid working hours for tens of millions of American workers has set in. At least 45 million people are now unemployed.  The crisis in front of us today is to keep millions of Americans from falling off the cliff. But the pandemic will end. And when it does, we need to make sure leaders in Washington recognize that we’d be better off keeping people away from the edge of the cliff in the first place.

 

The "personal responsibility" and "accountable for your choices" crowd always sniffs down their upturned noses at the poor, holding them responsible for their own poverty.

Yet somehow those ideas never seem to carry over into their own behavior.

The wealthy make the choice to pay themselves more because Chaz over at Corporation Z just got a 20% bump this year, and hey, they need that new vacation home and the yacht is getting old. They get that raise by shorting the people who make it possible, pushing their employees' actual life-supporting needs off on to the taxpayers...which is a hidden form of business welfare.

They get the money for their exorbitant salaries and bonuses by offshoring jobs, offshoring profits to avoid taxes, holding cities hostage for tax breaks, buying special treatment from politicians, and colluding to hold wages down.

When they are caught breaking laws, like Wells Fargo's massive identity thefts or PG&E's recent guilty pleas to 84 counts of manslaughter or BP's environmental destruction due to cutting corners on safety to sweeten profits not one has been held accountable for the choices the very well paid and bonused executives made. None stepped up and took personal responsibility.

Those choices create poverty, homelessness, environmental destruction, suicides, crime, and overburden local governments.

People may misconstrue this as asking for a life of luxury. All that’s being asked for is a life, especially when it’s being risked to COVID-19 exposure for the sake of an economy that grants only limited privileged access. Americans deserve better than the pittance they receive for their essential work.