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Millions of Americans work hard every day and do not make a livable wage. This is a growing group of workers, and unless something is done, it will likely grow even faster in the future. This is an ongoing injustice that has only recently gained the attention it deserves. Inspired by the national “living wage” movement and the recent struggles of American labor unions to revitalize themselves, this site is dedicated to helping undergraduate university teachers and students use working and living standards as a social justice issue in their classrooms. It should also be valuable in helping a broader public educate themselves about the various issues involved in determining the magnitude of the problem and what needs to be done to address it.

The Livable Wage Research & Education Project has a point of view and will argue that view across this site, but its broader purpose is to provide students and citizens with solid information and ideas from many perspectives to assist all of us in coming to grips with an injustice that challenges us both morally and practically. Wherever possible, the site strives to make opposing views readily accessible – not so much out of a sense of fairness as for their educational value in stimulating independent thinking about the difficult conceptual and research issues involved in making clear moral choices.

Work and “working hard” have an exalted status among American cultural values. As a result, various recent studies on “the working poor” have a unique capacity to elicit moral outrage, which is a potential spur to public action. But what are the moral foundations, in both religious and secular philosophical traditions, for placing work at the center of human existence and for insisting that workers be justly compensated for their contributions to the creation and maintenance of our shared social world? Moral Premise helps teachers and students explore these issues.

What is a “decent” standard of living and how many of us don’t have one?

Standards of material “decency” change over time, and there is an irreducibly subjective element to setting a minimum for a decent standard of living. Even so, sustained public discussion should be able to arrive at a consensus on a general standard that is more intellectually sophisticated and morally honest than our current poverty rate and minimum wage. Recent work by Wider Opportunities for Women, the Economic Policy Institute, and others emphasize how standards need to be locally or regionally based because of the wide differences in the cost-of-living by location, but they also set a higher standard for “hardship” and “self-sufficiency” and deploy much more realistic and sophisticated methodologies than the terribly outdated and abysmally low national definition of “poverty.” Another way to explore what constitutes a decent standard of living is by surveying Americans’ notions of what it takes to qualify as “middle class” in the U.S. today. Living Standards summarizes and links to the most important recent work on household and family budgets and estimates that between 30% and 40%, and maybe as many as 70%, of working families in America do not now have a decent standard of living.

What is a livable wage and how many workers don’t have one?

Defining a livable wage by how much money it takes to have a decent standard of living is complicated by how many persons are being supported by an individual’s wage. The household and family budgets in the Living Standards section recognize this. But workers’ wages must be related to the work they do and be fair in relation to others who do the same work; they cannot (and should not) vary by how many people one worker’s wage needs to support. As we’ll see in the next section, there are “social wage” public policies than can address this problem. The traditional concept of a “family wage” was tied to a breadwinner-male/homemaker-female family form that has been explicitly rejected as a norm by a majority of Americans. But a de-gendered idea of a “family wage” could be that one person’s wage should be able to provide a decent living for a family of three – whether that’s a single-parent family with two children, a married couple with one child, or various other combinations of three-person households. Using $15-an-hour ($30,000 a year for a full-time worker) with health insurance as a preliminary “livable wage,” for example, a single-person household might live quite well on that in many locations, but any family of three would struggle making do on those wages in most parts of the country. The Livable Wages section does not resolve these issues, but by looking at the changing composition of the American job structure, we suggest that an emerging majority of workers are not now receiving a livable wage for the work they do.

How can a livable wage, or progress toward it, be achieved?

This section takes the position that there is no one policy that can by itself move us toward assuring a livable wage for all those who work for a living, but that there are numerous possible combinations of existing and new policies that could relatively easily move us in that direction, given a moral consensus and political will. Minimum Wage Laws (at national, state and local levels) and laws that encourage and facilitate the formation of Labor Unions were specifically designed to put the cost of increased wages on employers. There are limits to what these laws and unions can do without having negative consequences on the economy and thereby hurting everyone, but we are nowhere near these limits now, after decades of degradation in the power of minimum wage laws and unions to lift wages, as they did for more than a quarter of a century after World War II. Still, there are inherent limits, particularly in a globalizing economy, to fixing wages above what the impersonal forces of supply and demand would determine as the “market wage.”

Thus, in addition to “juicing” the market wage, it is necessary to put some of the cost of achieving livable wages on citizens and taxpayers at large through "social wage" policies. We do this now through a wide range of policies from food stamps and housing vouchers to transportation subsidies and various tax and other macroeconomic policies. This section gives special attention to the Earned Income Tax Credit and to the importance of some form of taxpayer-based National Health Insurance because of their special potential to supplement and make livable many inherently low-wage jobs. But numerous “social wage” policy combinations are possible and debate about them, with sensitivity to who benefits and loses from various policy options, needs to occur within a moral context that all work should pay a livable wage.

We hope this section will help in moving social policy debate away from an exclusive focus on “poor unfortunate victims” or “the least advantaged” who need a “social safety net” to make up for their individual shortcomings – and toward a reasoned discussion of how to right a growing injustice by honoring hard work and making it pay a livable wage. The Policies section is, thus, not organized as a list, but as a kind of policy map as follows: