A living wage is the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. Needs are defined to include food, housing, and other essential needs such as clothing. The goal of a living wage is to allow a worker to afford a basic but decent standard of living. Due to the flexible nature of the term "needs", there is not one universally accepted measure of what a living wage is and as such it varies by location and household type.
Janet Louise Yellen is an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served as the Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018, and as Vice Chair from 2010 to 2014. Previously, she was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton; and business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
Under the Canadian Constitution, the responsibility for enacting and enforcing labour laws, including the minimum wage, rests with the ten provinces as well as the three territories which have been granted this power by federal legislation. Some provinces allow lower wages to be paid to liquor servers and other gratuity earners or to inexperienced employees.
David Edward Card is a Canadian labour economist and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alan Bennett Krueger was an American economist who was the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, nominated by President Barack Obama, from May 2009 to October 2010, when he returned to Princeton. He was nominated in 2011 by Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and served in that office from November 2011 to August 2013. He was among the 50 highest ranked economists in the world according to Research Papers in Economics.
The minimum wage in the United States is set by US labor law and a range of state and local laws. Employers generally have to pay workers the highest minimum wage prescribed by federal, state, and local law. Since July 24, 2009, the federal government has mandated a nationwide minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. As of January 2018, there were 29 states with a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum. From 2017 to 2018, eight states increased their minimum wage levels through automatic adjustments, while increases in eleven other states occurred through referendum or legislative action.
David Neumark is an American economist and a Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, where he also directs the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute.
In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. In the microeconomic theory of monopsony, a single entity is assumed to have market power over sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service, much in the same manner that a monopolist can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers.
The Employment Policies Institute is a fiscally conservative, non-profit American think tank that conducts and publishes research on employment issues, particularly aimed towards reducing the minimum wage. It was established in 1991 by Richard Berman, and has been described as "a nonprofit research group that studies issues of entry-level employment."
The paradox of toil is the economic hypothesis that total employment will shrink if everybody wants to work more when "the short-term nominal interest rate is zero and there are deflationary pressures and output contraction". When wages are pushed down by the simultaneous efforts of everyone in the labor force to work more even at lower wages, with interest rates against the zero bound, demand must fall because the only source of added demand would be added credit to compensate for those lower wages, credit which cannot be made available on any looser terms; this loss of demand leads to loss of jobs.
Michael Reich is a Polish-born economist who primarily focuses on labor economics and political economy. Currently, Reich is a professor of economics and director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968, he helped found the Union for Radical Political Economics.
The Minimum Wage Fairness Act is a bill that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) to increase the federal minimum wage for employees to $10.10 per hour over the course of a two-year period. The bill was strongly supported by President Barack Obama and many of the Democratic Senators, but strongly opposed by Republicans in the Senate and House.
Enrico Moretti is an Italian-born American economist and the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge), and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn). His research covers the fields of labor economics and urban economics. He has received several awards and honors, including the Society of Labor Economists’ Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to labor economics, the Carlo Alberto Medal, the IZA Young Labor Economist Award and a Fulbright Fellowship.
Michael R. Strain is an American economist. He is the John G. Searle Scholar and the director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
McKinley L. Blackburn is a U.S.-American economist and currently the James A. Morris Professor of Economics at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include labour economics, econometrics, and economic demography.
Mary C. Daly is an American economist, who became the 13th President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on October 1, 2018. Accordingly, she serves on the Federal Reserve's rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee on a rotating basis. Previously, Dr. Daly was the Executive Vice President and Director of Research of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which she joined as an economist in 1996.
Judith K. Hellerstein is the Chair of the Economics department and Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a former co-editor of The Journal of Human Resources, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she chairs the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys. She served as Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers during 2011-2012,
On the 1st May 2014 Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray announced plans to increase Seattle's minimum wage to $15 per hour incrementally over the next few years. Seattle was the first big city in the United States to raise its minimum wage to $15 after the rise of the "Fight for 15 movement". This policy decision resulted in Seattle having the highest minimum wage of any major city in the United States. Once Seattle raised its minimum wage many other major cities around the country also took action to increase the pay of low wage workers. There has been much debate over the effects the increases to the minimum wage have had on employment and overall economic conditions in Seattle. To determine the impacts of the policy a number of studies have been conducted; the most notable being research by the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley.
Arindrajit (Arin) Dube is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, known internationally for his empirical research on the effects of minimum wage policies. His work is focused on the economics of the labor market, including the role of imperfect competition, institutions, norms, and behavioral factors that affect wage setting and jobs.
