Minimum wage is the minimum amount of compensation an employee must receive for performing labor. Equivalently, it is the price floor below which workers may not sell their labor.
In 1890s, several attempts to introduce minimum wage were made in Australia and Newzealand.This movement started in order to reduce the number of workplaces that employed manual workers at low wages and made them work under extremely poor and socially unacceptable conditions. Such workplaces were also known as “sweatshops” at that time. The sweatshop owners were thought to have unfair bargaining power over their employees, and thus a minimum wage was proposed as a means to make them pay fairly.
In 1894, the government of New Zealand passed the first minimum wage law.
In 1912, Massachusetts, an
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As a part of his National Industrial Recovery Act, Roosevelt’s proposals called for companies to limit the working hours and raise wages in order to create more jobs.
In 1936, Roosevelt set up the Civilian Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), job creation programs, which employed people to build bridges, roads, parks, sewer systems, and schools. He not only opened up new jobs, he used it as an opportunity to raise wages. He paid the government employees really well, at least comparatively, and because government employees were a big enough player in the workforce, other employers had to respond in order to keep their labor force, which set sort of a minimum wage by example.
In 1937, the Washington state was allowed to have a minimum wage and the Great Depression moved even more states to enact protective minimum wage legislation, and by 1938, the federal government enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act and the federal minimum wage bill got passed. The minimum wage law also got reintroduced in the United Kingdom in