Brothers and Breadwinners: Legislating Living Wages in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

Attention to the implicit and explicit wage theories articulated by economic actors and embedded in public policy reveals the underlying social norms and values in specific historical and industrial contexts. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), the first federal minimum wage legislation in the United States, legitimated and institutionalized the idea that living standards and workers' needs matter in setting wages. They matter not simply in generating labor supply, but as the basis for government intervention in market mechanisms. Rather than viewing market mechanisms and government regulations dichotomously, economic actors debating the FLSA treated both market mechanisms and socially defined living standards as legitimate elements of wage-setting. Wage regulations also, by necessity, must grapple with issues of identity, that is, which workers (especially as defined by class, gender, and race - ethnicity) are deserving of particular living standards. Debates over the language in the FLSA reveal the contested nature of masculinity during the period of economic crisis in the 1930s. Advocates responded by defining a multiplicity of living wages corresponding with different living standards, as well as a multiplicity of strategies for achieving them.minimum wage, living wage, New Deal, gender, masculinity, economic policy,

Neither Mothers Nor Breadwinners: African-American Women's Exclusion From US Minimum Wage Policies, 1912-1938

We examine two key US labor market policies: state-level minimum wages for women from 1912-23 and the federal minimum wage established under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Each of these regulations implicitly defined which groups were and were not expected to conform to the hegemonic male breadwinner/female homemaker model of gender relations. In fact, social reformers and labor leaders advocated these policy measures as a means of extending the male-breadwinner family to recent European immigrants and white southerners. The male-breadwinner family and public policies designed to foster it became one means of defining a commonality of whiteness among different ethnic groups during a period of assimilation. Through the inclusion and exclusion of particular occupations and industries, African-American women were assigned a subordinated gender identity as neither full-time mothers nor legitimate breadwinners. They responded by forging their own gender identity as co-breadwinners.Gender, Race-ETHNICITY, Public Policy, Minimum Wage, Family Wage, Male-BREADWINNER Family,

Implicit Wage Theories in Equal Pay Debates in the United States

We identify three implicit wage theories in U.S. debates over the principle of equal pay for equal work: wages as a living , wages as a price , and wages as a social practice . Arguments for wages as a living emphasize that the purpose of the wage is to provide an adequate level of support for the worker. Proponents of wages as a price emphasize that wages allocate resources and are primarily the outcome of forces of supply and demand. To these two standard views we add an analysis of wages as a social practice. As a concrete social practice, wages shape as well as reflect gender, race, and class. It is only by recognizing that wages serve multiple functions and contain multiple meanings that we can grasp the complexity of wage-setting processes.Living Wages, Equal Pay Act, Pay Equity, Feminist Theory, Economic Methodology,