the.com/minimum wage
The price of labor the market would pay less for, if the law let it.
means The lowest hourly or weekly pay an employer is legally allowed to give a worker.
from A 20th-century legal-economic coinage, simply joining 'minimum' (Latin minimus, 'smallest') with 'wage' (from Old French 'wage/gage,' a pledge or payment, related to 'wager'). The phrase crystallized as governments began passing laws setting wage floors — New Zealand and Australia in the 1890s, the US federal minimum wage arriving in 1938 — turning a plain descriptive phrase into a fixed piece of labor-law vocabulary.
- origin
- New Zealand 1894, before economics got political
- us history
- 1938, born in the Fair Labor Standards Act
- real value
- federal rate unchanged since 2009, inflation never paused
- debate
- economists split: job killer or poverty fighter