Not paying people enough to live implies indifference to whether they continue to live, undermining basic standards of decency and further eroding the foundations of a functional democracy. Those may seem like minor tweaks, but they’re important progress, however partial. She added the cost of cellphone and broadband service, gathered more granular county data on child care costs and introduced a “civic engagement” category to support recreation, pets, museums, movies and reading material. Glasmeier, to her credit, recently made some changes to her calculator. Glasmeier readily acknowledges, her tool includes no provision for eating in a restaurant, buying gifts for loved ones, repaying school or credit card debt, saving for retirement or unexpected expenses or taking a vacation, however brief.ĭr. She also receives dozens of frustrated emails each month from people across America saying they can’t afford to live on her estimate of a living wage. She told me recently that roughly 100,000 people visit her living wage calculator every month and that she receives regular questions from many employers large and small who use the tool to set wages. Her calculator generates a “living wage” based on the number of children and working adults in a household, as well as the cost of housing, child care, transportation, out-of-pocket health care costs, food and other typical expenses (such as cleaning products) representative of conditions in their communities. A handful of “living wage calculators” attempt to solve both problems by far, the most widely cited is maintained by the M.I.T. There’s the moral imperative of framing a generous definition of “living,” and the empirical question of how much it costs in a country as wildly diverse and stratified as the United States. Such low wages are not inevitable they reflect political and moral choices about what defines a “normal standard of living,” and who deserves to enjoy one.ĭefining a meaningful living wage is a two-part challenge. More than a century later, millions of working Americans are still paid too little to afford the modest elements in Roosevelt’s vision. He saw paying workers enough to meet these basic standards as a matter of justice. Roosevelt was making a moral claim, not just an economic one. While its exact meaning is often left conveniently vague, Theodore Roosevelt offered a basic definition in a 1912 speech: A living wage should let workers “secure the elements of a normal standard of living,” including education, recreation, child care, a cushion for periods of sickness and savings for old age. The idea of a living wage is an old dream, with origins in the work of thinkers as ideologically diverse as Adam Smith, St.
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