Gov. Paul LePage, a staunch opponent of a November ballot question that seeks to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 per hour, says such an adjustment isn’t necessary because the minimum wage wasn’t meant to be a “living wage.” Rather, he said, the ballot question will benefit teenagers living at home with their parents.
He’s right that the minimum is now paid more commonly to teenagers than to full-time adult workers. But that was not the intent when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave the president broad leeway to regulate business, including setting maximum hours and minimum pay.
“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,” Roosevelt said in a June 1933 speech after signing the act into law. “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.”
The act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. But Roosevelt and other progressives didn’t give up on these ideas, and they included them in the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was enacted in 1938. The act set the maximum work week at 44 hours and the minimum wage at 25 cents per hour.
While Roosevelt spoke of the need for “living wage,” he had business-driven reasons for backing a minimum wage, especially during the Great Depression, when the lack of jobs was a significant problem. By limiting the work week to 44 hours, he reasoned, factories would have to hire more workers, lessening the staggering unemployment rate, which was 25 percent in 1933. Putting these men back to work earning wages meant they would have money to spend on products made in the U.S. This would increase demand for American goods, which would require more workers.
During a June 1938 fireside chat, Roosevelt spoke of the importance of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“Except perhaps for the Social Security Act, it is the most far-reaching, far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country,” he said. “Without question it starts us toward a better standard of living and increases purchasing power to buy the products of farm and factory.”
The federal minimum wage increased eight times between 1938 and 1968, the last year that the increase outpaced inflation. Since then, despite increases, the minimum wage has actually fallen when adjusted for inflation.
According to a 2014 analysis by Time magazine, the 1968 minimum wage of $1.60 per hour was worth $10.75 in 2014 dollars. By contrast, the current federal minimum wage is $7.25. In 1969, a full-time worker who earned the minimum wage for a year was nearly at the federally set poverty level. Last year, a full-time minimum wage worker was only at 60 percent of the poverty level. Maine’s minimum wage is $7.50 per hour.
Today, minimum wage earners do tend to be teens and young adults. Statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Standards show that 8.7 percent of workers between the ages of 16 and 19 earned the minimum wage in 2014. Less than 1 percent of workers 25 and older earn the minimum wage.
Minimum wage workers are concentrated in the hospitality, service and retail sectors, and many work part time.
A meaningful increase in the minimum wage would begin to return it to the original intent of being a “wage of decent living.”
