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The meaning, origins and development of a living wage

Introduction

A living wage is a concept that overlays a market transaction with a social meaning. At one level, a wage is simply the negotiated price attached to the selling of labour by an employee to an employer – part of an agreed exchange like the price paid for eggs or automobiles. Yet the notion of a living wage reminds us of a social aspect of this transaction – whether it allows employees and their dependants to reach an adequate standard of living.

The price of labour is also of interest to society because it can reflect the division of economic power. The shares of national income that accrue to labour and to capital, as well as the distribution of wages between higher and lower paid workers, have varied considerably over time. Classical economic theory says that these shares will be determined by the laws of supply and demand, with the price of various factors of production (land, labour and capital) partly reflecting their relative scarcity. In practice, they are also affected by a host of imperfections in markets, including unequal negotiating positions of different parties. In some cases, such as a well-organized trade union threatening to call a strike, this may potentially favour workers; in others, such as boardroom executives setting the pay of their peers or distributing profits to favour the better-off, it may help divert resources to managers or to shareholders.

Ever since the advent of wage labour, therefore, two fundamental questions have arisen for ordinary employees: are wages fair, and are they enough for a worker to subsist? These questions overlap, but are not identical. The issue of fairness may relate to whether a wage reflects the true value of a worker’s labour, a difficult to assess, somewhat abstract concept. A more concrete issue is whether the wage is enough to subsist at an acceptable level.

A living wage is one that is adequate for a worker to live on. This is the core concept behind a living wage, although it immediately raises a host of issues including what we mean by adequate, how many hours someone should have to work and the extent to which the wage should cover dependants – issues that will be addressed in this book.

Wages below an adequate level, produced by market transactions, can be problematic, for individuals, society and ultimately the economy. For individuals, they can produce poverty and hardship. For society, this can have knock-on effects, including for example high rates of illness or disease, or social unrest. For the economy, productivity may be damaged by the poor quality of labour that tends to be given by underpaid people living in hardship.

All these factors make it hard to disagree that workers should at least be paid a living wage. What is harder to say is exactly how such a wage should be calculated, and how it should be achieved in a market economy.

This book considers how living wages are being interpreted, advocated and implemented, and looks at a range of issues surrounding their implementation. First, however, this chapter looks at the history of living wages, and at how the ideas behind them have evolved to the present day.

Morality, rights and economic sustainability: the evolution of the living wage in thinking and practice

In modern societies, wage labour has for most people replaced other ways of translating work into survival – such as self-sufficiency, barter, feudal/family obligations and self-employment. Ever since wage labour emerged, the question has arisen of whether workers are paid enough to make a living. A centuries-old dialogue about living wages has involved religious thinkers and philosophers considering what is moral; and economic thinkers considering what brings prosperity. A striking aspect of this dialogue is how often moral and economic reasoning have been used to reinforce each other rather than being in conflict, often with a single thinker having both of these aspects in mind.

The following selective account traces how the idea of a just or living wage evolved, how the concept has interacted with economic developments of different times and how ideas have been translated into practice.

The medieval just price

In late medieval Europe, feudal duties and non-monetary forms of exchange started to be replaced by market transactions including wage labour. This transition from a system of well-understood obligations to the largely amoral workings of the market caused understandable concern that prices would unduly upset the economic order. Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas taught that prices should be just, by which he meant that they should follow the Christian teaching of taking into account other people’s needs. This meant that, as a minimum, both the seller and the buyer should be assured a livelihood. While markets could be used to determine the price within these constraints, it was considered immoral to make unfair use of unequal market power (see Stabile 2008: 15). There was also a strong concept of a normal and customary price from which it was wrong to depart, advocated for example by the early economic thinker Bernardino of Siena. Christian writers of this time did not deny the role of the market in determining the normal price, but considered virtuous economic behaviour to exclude taking undue advantage of a favourable market position.

It is interesting to note that one of the most important early interventions to curb what was considered unfairness in labour markets was to legislate not for a minimum wage but for a maximum wage. In the wake of the Black Death, the shortage of labour in England was enabling peasants to leave the lands to which they had been tied through the feudal system, and to demand relatively high wages elsewhere. The Statute of Labourers, passed in 1351, decreed a maximum wage and attempted to prevent workers from moving around. This prompted the unsuccessful Peasants’ Revolt. In the centuries that followed, similar laws allowed local magistrates and guilds to regulate wages in particular trades, sometimes setting minimum and sometimes maximum levels, but to a large degree defending the interests of employers rather than workers. However, in an early demonstration that regulation cannot easily push against market forces, it proved hard in the middle ages to prevent agricultural wages from rising in response to falling population: they roughly doubled in the century following the original Statute of Labourers. On the other hand, after population started increasing in the sixteenth century, real wages fell sharply, and despite advances in agriculture, by the 1860s they were no higher than at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt (Clark 2007).

ARTICULATING THE LIVING WAGE: PRE-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

Key concept

•The language of equitable wages in this period emphasized fairness and justice.

What they said

Merit and reward refer to the same, for a reward means something given anyone in return for work or toil, as a price for it. Hence, as it is an act of justice to give a just price for anything received from another, so also is it an act of justice to make a return for work or toil. Aquinas (1265–74)

For the worker is worth his keep. Matthew 10.10

Classical economics and faith in markets

If medieval church thinkers felt that market behaviour must be bounded by Christian faith, modern economists felt rather that we should have faith in markets, to produce the best outcomes. In particular, Adam Smith, the father of economics, argued that markets rather than individual morality were the route to collective prosperity in the modern world. He was writing in the late eighteenth century, when urbanization and industrialization were making it much harder to be guided by what Smith called the moral economy: well understood social and economic relationships that worked best in small-scale, stable communities. While the Christian principle of taking account of the needs of others was still valid, it could not guide all economic transactions.

Smith believed that a freely functioning market would produce the desirable result of ensuring that workers would achieve a subsistence wage. Unlike some people using the term subsistence to describe the bare means of survival, Smith used it to mean providing necessaries:

By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. (Smith 1776: 479)

This shows that the idea of a living wage needing to be seen in relation to the way people live in a particular country at a particular time, rather than judged by an absolute standard, is nothing new.

Smith believed that free markets worked to keep wages at or above such a level (other than in declining industries that were being replaced by more viable ones), and indeed to increase what this minimum entailed, by raising general prosperity. He argued that if wages fell below subsistence, the supply of labour would be undermined as workers may choose to beg or steal to make ends meet, while a sufficient wage helped maintain workers in a capable state. In other words, adequate wages enhance both the quality and the quantity of the labour supply, making employers willing to pay such wages. He also observed that interference with markets tended in his time to have the malign effect of keeping wages down (such as through agreements within a trade to cap wages), since those in power were still generally on the side of the masters. Hence deregulation of labour markets was in Smith’s view the best route to a living wage.

Thus the dawn of modern economics saw strong support for a living wage, but confidence that it could best be achieved by letting markets work unhampered. Other early economic thinkers such as the philosopher John Stuart Mill agreed with Smith about the importance of maintaining wages at least at an adequate level, although another early economist, Robert Malthus, was more gloomy about the long-term effects of rising productivity, believing that it would always lead to population expansion, which kept workers at a low level of subsistence. While Mill supported Smith’s view opposing regulation enabling employers to restricting wages, he proposed that free markets may not be enough to redress the balance in favour of employees without individual workers combining into trade unions (Mill [1909] 1969: 933–4).

The early economists therefore emphasized the benefits of people pursuing their interests freely in market transactions, in contrast to the medieval reliance on moral behaviour. Yet unlike free market economists today, Adam Smith and his successors attached great economic importance to wages being adequate. They were concerned with the collective capabilities of labour, and the part that wage levels play in this. Perhaps because so many workers at the time were at the margins of physical subsistence, they connected worker well-being and living standards with the productive potential of labour. Even the production of future workers, through procreation, was seen to be affected by the well-being of today’s employees. Thus, adequate wage levels were linked closely to economic sustainability and future growth. Current prevailing economic theory, on the other hand, considers workers much more as individuals, starting with the principle that wages are determined by the marginal product of labour. This means that an employer will hire an additional worker only if someone is willing to accept a job at an hourly wage no greater than the value of what they can produce in an hour (minus any other costs of hiring them). A market system that considers wages only in this context makes no reference to consequences for living standards or for the aggregate effect on labour supply of how wage levels compare to workers’ basic needs.

The crusade for living wages in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries

As the industrial revolution progressed, it became ever harder to agree with Adam Smith’s assessment that markets could be relied upon to bring workers to a living standard that met their basic needs. Describing conditions in the sweatshops of East London in the 1880s, the social reformer Beatrice Webb cited a chilling report from a parliamentary committee:

These evils can scarcely be exaggerated … earnings barely sufficient to sustain existence; hours of labour such as to make the lives of the workers periods of almost ceaseless toil, hard and unlovely to the last degree; sanitary conditions injurious to the health of the persons employed and dangerous to the public. (Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System 1888–9: xlii, xliii)

The asymmetry of power between employers and their workers, already acknowledged by Smith, was not proving easy to correct. In Karl Marx’s view, it was endemic to capitalism, since employers held property and workers were constrained to sell their labour in order to survive (Marx [1885] 1977: 769). Moreover, in a growing economy, Marx saw subsistence as a changing concept, since social satisfaction is relative to the norms of the society one lives in, so as society prospers, people need more (Marx [1849] 1972: 180). Yet workers were hampered