“Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.” — David Shipler

Awhile back I wrote about the workers of Netflix and their $9.00 per hour jobs. Most of the reader comments concluded that it was fair pay for unskilled work happening in these Netflix hubs. However, the point of that post really was to pose the question about what equates to a living wage. The number really is arbitrary as we’ve learned this week with all the minimum wage news and debate.

The New York Times quoted Robert E. Andrews, New Jersey Representative, urging before the vote, “This is the day for the people who empty the bedpans, change the bed linens, sweep the floors and do the hardest work of America.”

The House listened and approved a $2.10-an-hour increase in the federal minimum wage. The article continues on to describe how it would go into effect and the result to workers. Carl Hulse writes, “The measure would increase the minimum wage to $5.85 an hour 60 days after being signed into law, to $6.55 one year after that, and to $7.25 after an additional year. For a minimum-wage employee working full time, $7.25 would mean about $4,000 a year more than the current floor.”

Who is this minimum wage employee? “They perform labor essential to America’s comfort, writes David Shipler, author of The Working Poor. “They are white and black, Latino and Asian–men and women in small towns and city slums trapped near the poverty line, where the margins are so tight that even minor setbacks can cause devastating chain reactions.”

Shipler’s book shows how both sides of the debate are partly right and that every life story contains failure by both the society and the individual. However, a conservative like George F. Will asserts, “Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities’ prices.” He thinks the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. In my opinion, he makes some fair points in his Washington Post Op-Ed piece.

But the scathing rebuttal from Kevin Drum in the Washington Monthly is even better. He writes, “It’s worth noting that Will is mistaken in two different ways. First, as a matter of empirical economics, workers aren’t commodities. Unlike pig iron ingots, they respond to incentives, they can be trained to operate more efficiently; they put their paychecks back into circulation, etc.”

“Second, he’s mistaken in a moral sense. A rich society really has no excuse for not setting bare minimum levels of decency for all human interactions, including those between employer and employee.”

This brings us back to the question about what is a living wage? The Living Wage movement argues that no one who works full time should have to live in poverty. Shuna Fish Lydon, a pastry chef in San Francisco and one of our Ten Money Questions interviewees had some great thoughts on this topic last year. What do you think?