The Minimum Wage, Decent Wages, and Time Sovereignty in the European Union

Kathleen A. Ragon, Gettysburg College

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Description

Of all the great political economists it was Marx who emphasized the need to study economic processes in material terms. For Marx, one of the most important material elements of work and working was time since time is a structure through which the labor process takes place. In its most common form, the minimum wage is a legally mandated relationship between money and time. Traditionally studies of the minimum wage have focused on the money side of this relationship (e.g. how much do minimum wage workers earn) while ignoring its temporal aspects (e.g. how long someone has to work to receive a particular income). This is a significant oversight because it overlooks the temporal investments that minimum wage workers must make in order to achieve a specific sum of money (e.g. there is a significant temporal difference if a minimum wage workers can achieve an income above a poverty threshold by working part-time, full-time, or more than full-time). To address this oversight, we calculate the number of hours individuals and families earning the minimum wage would have to work in order to achieve both poverty- and median-level incomes in various European Union countries. Our findings show two things. One is that there are significant differences between how long minimum wage workers would have to work in order to achieve these income thresholds. The other is that while in some countries this amount is relatively stable over time, in others it can vary quite considerably. The significance of our findings in relation to the labor process are then discussed.

 
May 5th, 12:00 PM May 5th, 1:00 PM

The Minimum Wage, Decent Wages, and Time Sovereignty in the European Union

Breidenbaugh Hall 209

Of all the great political economists it was Marx who emphasized the need to study economic processes in material terms. For Marx, one of the most important material elements of work and working was time since time is a structure through which the labor process takes place. In its most common form, the minimum wage is a legally mandated relationship between money and time. Traditionally studies of the minimum wage have focused on the money side of this relationship (e.g. how much do minimum wage workers earn) while ignoring its temporal aspects (e.g. how long someone has to work to receive a particular income). This is a significant oversight because it overlooks the temporal investments that minimum wage workers must make in order to achieve a specific sum of money (e.g. there is a significant temporal difference if a minimum wage workers can achieve an income above a poverty threshold by working part-time, full-time, or more than full-time). To address this oversight, we calculate the number of hours individuals and families earning the minimum wage would have to work in order to achieve both poverty- and median-level incomes in various European Union countries. Our findings show two things. One is that there are significant differences between how long minimum wage workers would have to work in order to achieve these income thresholds. The other is that while in some countries this amount is relatively stable over time, in others it can vary quite considerably. The significance of our findings in relation to the labor process are then discussed.