Class Year
2013
Document Type
Student Research Paper
Date of Creation
2013
Department 1
Sociology
Abstract
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 worker 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 the poverty-level income in the 20 European Union countries with national statutory minimum wages. Our findings show two things. One is that there are significant differences between how long minimum wage workers must 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 considerably.
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution
Recommended Citation
Ragon, Kathleen A., "The Minimum Wage, Decent Wages, and Time Sovereignty in the European Union" (2013). Student Publications. 84.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/84
Included in
Eastern European Studies Commons, Economic Policy Commons, Economics Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Social Welfare Commons, Work, Economy and Organizations Commons