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This chapter examines the factors that influence the decisions of politicians (and others) to support or oppose higher minimum wages, and considers why minimum wages remain so popular even though many economists oppose them. It also discusses the newest manifestation of mandated wage floors—living wages—which are enacted at the city level and cover a narrower set of workers.

Although living wage movements have appeared throughout this century, the contemporary movement is centered on a specific policy: passing a local ordinance to raise the wage floor for a specified group of workers covered by the ordinance. This chapter focuses on the living wage movement in the United States and whether it is an effective policy tool for raising the living standards of the working poor. It first suggests a typology for the different local ordinances currently in place based on coverage, wage levels, and other requirements. It then considers the arguments for and against living wages, focusing on the motivations behind the campaigns, such as the increase in wage and income inequality, the increase in privatization of public services, and the increase in the use of tax abatements to increase local economic activity. It also discusses the arguments of those who oppose living wages. One innovative approach with the potential to meet both the goals of the movement and concerns of those who oppose living wages is combining a living wage with a local Earned Income Tax Credit.

In this chapter, the author demonstrates the synergy between scholarship and engagement based on her experience as a researcher with the living wage movement in Los Angeles and the ways in which this experience shaped her future academic career. Not only did she continue to be involved with living-wage campaigns in other cities, but her academic research shifted as well to focus on this topic. The modern living wage movement emerged just as a fierce debate about minimum wages raged. The author expresses the frustrations of academics who enter the world of activists—issue campaigns are often primarily ideological rather than based on research, and opponents insist on oversimplifying the issues involved. Scholars must accept that the best-reasoned argument does not always win. Nonetheless, the author contends that researchers can make important contributions to movements, not only in terms of producing research to meet the short-term goals of a campaign, but also in analyzing campaigns on a larger scale that can help movements formulate and pursue larger goals. She concludes with a discussion of the challenges involved in engaged scholarship and activism.

Activism by labor and community coalitions at the local level is redefining labor law in the United States. Despite a drastic decline in union density and power in the United States, labor and community alliances have emerged at the local level that seek to influence labor conditions outside of the traditional collective bargaining framework. Unions and their community allies in some cities have had success in securing living wages, job training, local hiring preferences, workplace safety protections, health insurance benefits, and even job security for local workers. These achievements have been built on a new legal foundation: local government law. Labor-community alliances have leveraged different facets of local government power — contracting, land use, and general regulatory power — to achieve labor objectives through local ordinances and negotiated community benefit agreements. This chapter describes some of the ways in which these new labor-community alliances have exercised power at the local level. It pays particular attention to Los Angeles where local labor activism has achieved a series of remarkable successes through the robust use of local governmental levers. The chapter then addresses the question of whether, and to what extent, local labor initiatives can provide an adequate substitute for, or enhancement of, labor power at the national level.

Wage debates in twentieth-century Europe were dominated by a new regulating principle: the minimum vital, ‘living wage’ or Existenzminimum. This chapter analyzes the political-scientific content of the ‘vital’ or ‘living’ component of the living wage. The figure of the vital minimum traveled from classical political economy to physical energetics, Marxism and social Catholicism, to social statistics to Fordist wage regulation and welfare. The vital minimum performed multiple rhetorical and political functions, often contradictory. It could refer to a physiological threshold, grounded in chemical-thermodynamic studies of individual male model organisms (workers.) Or the vital minimum could describe a collective cultural and sociological norm, subject to change over time. Welfare politics invoked both physiology and sociology via the vital minimum. The French welfare state first mobilized the vital minimum as an individual minimum wage. Later it changed sites and reappeared as the logic behind a collective family allowance.

In-work poverty has been a problem in the UK for many years. Since wage supplements were condemned in the 19th century, various approaches have been taken to deal with the seemingly intractable problem that wages under capitalism cannot always deliver an above poverty income for many working people and families. Placing the analysis in this historical context, the chapter focuses upon contemporary developments in, and debates about, policies to address in-work poverty. The chapter focuses upon the development of Universal Credit and how it can be understood in long-term concerns with in-work poverty. The chapter also discusses contemporary debates about the living wage as a means of addressing in-work poverty. The chapter argues that in-work poverty is likely to remain a problem as governments continue to seek to constrain public spending and developments regarding the living wage remain constrained by political and orthodox economic concerns.

This chapter studies the emergence of the contemporary living wage movement in the United States. By conscious political choice, U.S. politicians decided to undermine the original intent of the minimum wage by refusing to raise it adequately over the last half-century. Despite increased worker productivity, the minimum wage remains far below what is necessary for a small family in this country. The increase in working poverty thus signals both the economic and political poverty of low-wage workers. Religious organizations join coalitions for a living wage precisely to counter these intertwined poverties. The reemergence of progressive religious activism and the rebirth of religion–labor–community coalitions for living wages have been mutually reinforcing. The chapter shows how religious activists seek to enhance the economic political agency of low-wage workers and put poverty back on the national agenda.

This essay suggests that US proposals for a federal minimum wage, which achieved success in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, emerged in a transnational discourse shaped by the introduction of a compulsory minimum wage in Victoria, Australia in 1896 and the definition of the minimum wage as a “living wage,” owed to workers in their capacity as human beings, by H. B. Higgins, president of the Australian Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. Higgins met leading Progressive reformers in Boston, New York, and Washington, in 1914. The essay also notes the importance of the world-historic context of the mobility of Chinese labor in the trans-Pacific world in the nineteenth century that led to the insistence in Australia that “white men’s wages” be protected by a legal minimum wage and associated wages boards.

This introductory chapter presents three major insights that can be obtained in analyzing religious activists in the living wage movement. First, the roles of religious activists and their ethical underpinnings can be better understood even in a seemingly secular movement. Second, one can better understand the actual, rather than projected, challenges of ethics and agency that the movement faces, which will then aid in its scope and effectiveness. Finally, one can begin to understand the movement's goals more broadly, which helps in contextualizing the movement in larger efforts toward the expansion of democracy in the United States, both politically and economically. Ultimately, religious activists are not merely mobilizing for a specific policy measure, they are also seeking and enacting an expanded vision of democratic polity founded on greater economic equity and representation.

This concluding chapter contemplates on the next stages of the living wage movement. The movement is best seen as a gateway to other worker justice struggles such as raising state and federal minimum wages, developing and enforcing anti-wage theft laws, fair treatment of undocumented workers, and negotiating community benefit agreements. As with previous campaigns, religious activists not only aim to enact concrete policies, but also build the moral agency of low-wage workers and their allies in order to alter the landscape of the political economy. As the movement enters new stages, the chapter reviews the lessons and challenges the movement's work has presented so far. Strong economic political agency for the working poor and their religious allies entails not only making good moral arguments, but also parallel work in bridge building, alternative political development, gendered leadership, and ritual renewal.

This chapter canvasses a long-term vision for improving the lives of poor and precarious workers who work in informal conditions. It proposes a bold, transnational initiative that aims to promote a global living wage and regulate supply chains. The chapter puts forward three interrelated regulatory pathways out of informality. First, the promotion of Global Living Wages through a multilateral instrument such as an International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention or United Nations treaty, which would also establish an International Living Wage disputes mechanism for enforcement of these minima; second, the setting up of National Living Wage Tribunals empowered to hear disputes concerning non-payment of living wages due to supply chain dynamics and to hold parties in the supply chain responsible for non-payment; third, the fostering of local pathways out of informality.

This chapter focuses on an increasingly important avenue for trying to enforce—and possibly improve upon—labour standards, namely public procurement. It looks primarily at the EU rules on procurement to see how much—if any—scope there is for including ‘social clauses’ ie clauses which require tenderers to respect certain terms and conditions of employment. While the decisions in Laval and Rüffert appear to narrow the scope for imposing such clauses in the context of free movement of services, Commission v Germany (occupational pensions) might offer some more room for manoeuvre in the field of public procurement more generally. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of the scope for contractors voluntarily to assume additional commitments, taking as an example the London Living Wage campaign.

This chapter and the following chapter contain an account of the emergence of two movements: the fight for a living wage and the struggle to win marriage equality. Each movement became the signature issue of larger and older social movements at the same time in the mid-1990s. Though they came into existence the same year, the two movements took different tracks in pursuit of political challenges to the existing arrangement of resources, recognition, power, and privilege. Their differences cannot be adequately explained by the fact that the two movements advocated for different kinds of issues. Instead, their dissimilarity was manifold, beginning with two distinct conceptions of power that led to observably different organizational structures, organizational cultures, and interorganizational environments within the broader movements. These differences led the movements to make different choices regarding the institutional venues chosen for action as well as the preferred tactics that each employed.

This chapter focuses on the content and meaning of the mainstream discourses about the living wage and marriage equality as well as how each changed in the decade of its emergence. The book’s hypothesis is that the difference in the way these two movement issues appeared in public discussion is a significant factor in the differential impact that each has had on American politics generally, and the differential outcomes that the two social movements have had in achieving lasting success. This chapter lays out those differences in mainstream public discourse by submitting the text to both the qualitative textual analysis engaged in throughout the book, as well as the quantitative examination that is the subject of this chapter. The method of textual analysis throughout has been inductive, and the qualitative and quantitative examinations are inextricably linked.

This chapter explores the modern minimum wage framework in detail. The first section begins by exploring the background to the National Minimum Wage Act through the lens of the relationship between minimum wages and wage supplementation. The second section then explores the conceptual structure of the Act in more detail. In particular, it explores how an individual’s minimum wage entitlement is assessed; the types of ‘work’ that are either implicitly or expressly, excluded from the Act; and the content of the concept of the ‘wage’. It concludes with some remarks about what the Act’s structure implies about the legal system’s understanding of the role of minimum ‘wage’ regulation today.

What is a need, a want, a luxury? This chapter establishes ‘need’ as a social, biological, scientific and political category in need of a history. Chemist Antoine Lavoisier articulated a fundamental dilemma of the modern social order: workers, by virtue of their bodily expenditure, need to consume more fuel than the leisured classes. Yet the rich enjoy an abundance that they do not physically need. Lavoisier, writing in the thick of the French Revolution, articulated a disjunction between wealth, wages and needs, the social order and natural order. His dilemma sets out the central problematic of this book. The chapter further introduces the notion of quantum life, whose opposite is not death but non-productivity. ‘Vital minimum’, ‘minimum existence’ and the ‘living wage’ expressed a social necessity - the need to reproduce labor - in the language of life.

This chapter explores the living wage as an anti-poverty measure from the perspective of welfare economics and Jewish law. It discusses the following issues of economic morality: legitimate interferences of employers to the market forces and the accomplishment of the anti-poverty objective. It also provides an analysis on the anti-poverty policies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit for supply side and increase in employment opportunities on the demand side of the marketplace.

This chapter focuses on the contributions of feminist organizations to living wage activism and discusses their connections to religious activists. Partially motivated by the feminization of poverty, certain feminist foundations, organizations, and researchers provide important resources for the living wage movement. Women represent half of all the organizers and board members in religious organizing. This is important since women are generally underrepresented in political engagement, and these women provide crucial role models. However, this “feminization of organizing” can be a problem when women religious organizers lack the structural support (childcare, healthcare, retirement) necessary to sustain their positions. The chapter also considers the “sacrificial” demands of low-wage worker organizers and the support needed for women organizers.