scholarly journals RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE OF THE US WORKFORCE

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-43
Author(s):  
Kshama Mumbai
Keyword(s):  
Minimum Wage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Legislative Action ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Federal Minimum Wage ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Wage Floor

“The Lawrence Textile Strike, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike”, prompted the first minimum wage law in the United States in 1912. Various states followed suit over the next two decades, and in 1938, at the height of the Great Depression, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a federal minimum wage (FLSA).The basic incentive behind the introduction of the Act was to reduce income inequality.A rise in minimum wage acts as a form of relocation of wealth from higher-income people to lower-income people. In principle, Congress amends the FLSA on a regular basis to raise the federal minimum wage to levels necessary for even the lowest-paying workforces in the economy.It also aims to help low-wage workers benefit from overall economywide advances in living standards. However, this has historically not always been the case. In 1968, The Poor People’s 1 Campaign started because of not raising the minimum wage to sufficient levels . The explicit purpose of the federal minimum wage is to help increase consumer purchasing power which stimulates the economy and to keep America's workforces out of poverty.However,the law failed to include the automatic cost of living adjustments and led to inflation eroding the real value of the minimum wage over time. There is a dire need for legislative action to raise the nation’s wage floor, more so than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic.Unless consumer's purchasing power is increased,it will be difficult to come out of this recession.Further,the minimum wage is a direct concern for poverty levels and gender / racial inequality.This paper aims to analyze previous work on the issue and provide further recommendations for the same.

Compensating Tipped Work: Security Cameras as a Tool for Time Use Measurement

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Emily D. Campion ◽  
Michael C. Campion ◽  
Michael A. Campion
Keyword(s):  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Time Use ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Federal Minimum Wage ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
Work Security ◽  
Self Report Data ◽  
Fair Labor

While tipped labor is common in the United States, it presents potential issues for employers unable to demonstrate how tipped workers use their time, thus violating the Fair Labor Standards Act and attracting lawsuits. According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, if tipped employees spend more than 20% of their workweek completing non-tipped tasks (e.g., cleaning, stocking), then they are eligible for the Federal minimum wage ($7.25 in 2018) for the hours beyond 20%, rather than the minimum wage for tipped employees ($2.13 in 2018). Traditionally, employers have used self-report data or observers to determine time use, but these are problematic given self-report bias and the Hawthorne effect. In response, we conducted a study using security cameras to document employee time use in a sample of employees at a large chain restaurant. We found that the sample did not violate the 20% rule. Furthermore, we demonstrated an alternative method to study time use with technology most service-based companies already have.

On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

The author's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. This book presents four decades of the author's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. The book's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: the interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on the author's pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. The book's second half turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. The book concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.

scholarly journals A POPULAR CULTURE RESEARCH ON AMERICAN HEGEMONY IN TRANSNATIONAL WOMEN MAGAZINE ADVERTISEMENTS

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Transnational American Studies ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

Women magazine advertisements from the United States of America (U.S.A.) cross border in space of time and location due to the transnational characteristics of American popular culture. By traveling through spaces of time, an advertisement from previous years is possible to come up again in many years after. This occurence happens in some U.S. women magazine advertisements. Meanwhile through spaces of location, U.S. magazine advertisements can also be published in magazines from other nations with almost no real difference in its visualizations, like what happens in Indonesian women magazines. Scholars claim the occurrence is influenced by the American hegemony phenomena. Working under the American Studies discipline, the researcher chooses a total of 3621 women magazine advertisements from the 2007-2008 issues of U.S. Ladies Home Journal, O: The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan; Indonesian Cosmopolitan, Kartini, and Femina, as well as 1960 Ladies Home Journal to become the main data for research. In her research, a thread of popular culture, consumer culture and gender ideology perspectives are found. First, through popular culture, the advertisements gain an easy access for transnationality and globalization. Second, through consumer culture, the researcher finds that women are acknowledged as the highest potential as consumers because they are the decision makers of their own family’s household expenses. Third, by dissecting and analyzing the advertisements in more detail, the research also finds that gender ideology confirms how society still want women to maintain the traditional roles of women as mothers and housewives.Keywords: Transnational American Studies, popular culture, hegemony, gender ideology

Causes and Consequences of American Minimum Wage Legislation, 1911–1947

1995 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
The State ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Early American ◽  
Federal Minimum Wage ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
Minimum Wage Legislation

Although in the last two decades there have been literally hundreds of studies of postwar minimum wage legislation, there have been but a handful of studies of the first federal minimum wage, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), and no studies of the state laws that preceded it.1 My dissertation attempts to bridge this gap by examining the political economy and effects of early American minimum wage legislation.

scholarly journals The Minimum Wage and the Labor Market

2007 ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Rocheteau ◽  
Murat Tasci
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Federal Minimum Wage ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
Real Value ◽  
Hourly Workers ◽  
Fair Labor ◽  
Three Phases

The federal minimum wage was established in 1938 by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Initially set at 25 cents an hour, the wage has been raised periodically to reflect changes in inflation and productivity. From September 1997 to the beginning of 2007, the minimum wage stood at $5.15 an hour, but its real value declined steadily from about 40 percent of the average private nonsupervisory wage to a mere 30 percent. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage was lower at the beginning of 2007 than at any time since 1955 (see figure 1). Meanwhile, the wage affected fewer people, as the fraction of hourly workers who earned no more than the minimum dropped from around 15 percent in 1980 to just 2.2 percent in 2006. On May 24, 2007, Congress passed a bill raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25 in three phases over two years.

scholarly journals REVALUATION OF MINIMUM WAGES IN MEXICO AND ITS FINANCIAL IMPACT ON ORGANIZATIONS AND PRIMARILY ON SMEs

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-20
Author(s):  
José G. Vargas-Hernández ◽  
Rafael Casas-Cardenaz ◽  
Rebeca Almanza Gutiérrez
Keyword(s):  
Minimum Wage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Consumer Prices ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Wage Earners ◽  
United States Mexico

The development of this work is aimed at emphasizing the devaluation suffered by the general minimum wage in Mexico, highlighting the need for its revaluation as a response to the economic marginalization of vulnerable sectors and regions with greater lag in the country, as well as a to stop the deterioration of the wage-earners' living standards mainly, taking into account the demands of nations with respect to the new Agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada (USMCA). However, its recovery must be planned through a gradual process that allows the progressive adaptation with respect to its economic impact. For this, a qualitative and quantitative analysis was carried out, describing its deterioration, the loss of purchasing power, proposing a restitution scheme in a period of six years to avoid affecting financially organizations and SMEs mainly. Keywords: National index of consumer prices, inflation, purchasing power, SMEs and minimum wage. JEL: E21, E24, E31.

The Great Depression

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gellman ◽  
Margaret Rung
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Adequate Food ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Modern Economic ◽  
And Gender

From the late 1920s through the 1930s, countries on every inhabited continent suffered through a dramatic and wrenching economic contraction termed the Great Depression, an economic collapse that has come to represent the nadir of modern economic history. With national unemployment reaching well into double digits for over a decade, productivity levels falling by half, prices severely depressed, and millions of Americans without adequate food, shelter or clothing, the United States experienced some of the Great Depression’s severest consequences. The crisis left deep physical, psychological, political, social, and cultural impressions on the national landscape. It encouraged political reform and reaction, renewed labor activism, spurred migration, unleashed grass-roots movements, inspired cultural experimentation, and challenged family structures and gender roles.

Outside the Law: Agricultural and Domestic Workers Under the Fair Labor Standards Act

1995 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 416-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fair Labor

In 1966, at the end of almost two decades of civil rights agitation, men and women of color redressed one significant historical injustice—the legislative exemption of tens of thousands of farmworkers from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which guaranteed a minimum wage and maximum hours of work for covered workers. In 1974, after almost a decade of feminist agitation, domestic workers convinced the Congress that even private household service fell within the act's minimum-wage coverage of workers engaged in interstate commerce. The two occupations in which most African Americans and a large number of other nonwhite Americans worked in 1938, and in which significant numbers remained in the 1960s and 1970s, joined the roster of jobs covered by this fundamental legislation. Coverage of the country's least powerful workers and its least valued jobs finally overturned central racial and gender inequalities encoded in the nation's basic labor standards law and awarded workers and jobs long-sought recognition and respect.

Home

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-77
Author(s):  
Benjamin Wiggins
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Mortgage Loans ◽  
Risk Rating ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Federal Housing ◽  
To Come ◽  
National Emergency

The economic collapse that set into motion the Great Depression of the 1930s was portended by mass mortgage defaults in the mid-1920s. To address this unprecedented housing crisis, New Deal legislation created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure mortgage loans. Without predecessors or peers and faced with a national emergency, the FHA turned to risk-rating experts in real estate valuation to craft underwriting policies that would shape the geography of the country and cement racial segregation in the United States for generations to come. Chapter 3 details how FHA officials utilized risk-rating standards that disqualified people of color from obtaining federally subsidized mortgage insurance. This institutional discrimination had the deleterious effect of essentially precluding people of color from obtaining middle-class America’s most important wealth-generating asset: the single-family home. Though others have written about the agency’s policies before, my analysis is notably the first to locate each version of the FHA’s underwriting manual, to take stock of each facet of race-based risk rating until the conclusion of the practice in 1947, and to analyze the agency’s effect on the lending industry thereafter.

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