Living wage

In 2001 a dormant idea with deep historical roots was revived in London’s East End: the living wage. A living wage is the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. Needs include food, housing, clothing etc. Family circumstances vary and no realistic hourly pay rate can ever lift every family to an adequate living standard. 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, the term "needs" varies by location and household type.

• A living wage generally means that a person working 40 hours a week, with no additional income, should be able to afford the basics for a modest but decent life, such as, food, shelter, utilities, transport, health care, and child care. Whereas minimum wage focuses on what the labor market can bear without a significant effect on employment.
• Living wage advocates have further defined a living wage as the wage equivalent to the poverty line for a family of four. The income would have to allow the family to 'secure food, shelter, clothing, health care, transportation and other necessities of living in modern society'.
• The living wage differs from the minimum wage in that the latter is set by national law and can fail to meet the requirements to have a basic quality of life which leaves the family to rely on government programs for additional income.
• Employee, employer, and community all benefited with a living wage. Employees would be more willing to work, helping the employer reduce worker turnover, and it would help the community when the citizens have enough to have a decent life. 
• A living wage, by increasing the purchasing power of low income workers, focuses on stimulating demand in order to improve the state of the economy.
• Low wages and excessive working hours in global supply chains often leave full-time workers and their families to live in poverty. Adoption of a living wage meets workers’ basic needs to maintain a safe, decent standard of living. 
• The real living wage is based on the cost of living and is voluntarily paid by employers who believe a hard day's work deserves a fair day's pay. 
• In UK, far too many people earn far too little to get by. UK has a high share of low-paid workers, with one in five employees in low-paid work. The rate of low pay has risen gradually for the past 30 years. It is most prevalent among women, part-time and younger workers. In some sectors it is endemic; in hospitality, 69% of workers are low paid, in retail 41%. Recent years have also seen gradually rising rates of in-work poverty. While the minimum wage safeguards around one million of these workers from extreme low pay, on its own it is not a solution to the wider problem of endemic low-paid work. 
• Some 23% of jobs outside London paid less than the living wage in 2014, compared with 19% in London.  Local and regional initiatives continue to proliferate, building on a string of successes that have secured improvements in pay for nearly 45,000 low-paid workers. Living wage initiatives have reshaped social norms around wages and in-work poverty and have refocused attention on the role that decent pay above the national minimum can play in raising living standards, alongside remedial redistribution through tax credits and in-work benefits. 
• The Walton family which owns Wal-Mart is the wealthiest family in America and it is absurd that thousands of their low-wage workers are forced to use programs like food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. Wal-Mart should not be paying starvation wages. Struggling working families should not have to subsidize the wealthiest family in the country. 

The real poverty in our society lies with those who are not in work at all, and the implementation of the living wage will do nothing to improve their chances of a job. The solutions for the unemployed are different from those for low-paid jobs and a single measure cannot help both groups and risks harming one at the expense of the other. It is insanity that companies pay small wages and high taxes and the government uses those taxes to supplement to the low wages. It would be better for companies to pay higher wages and for the benefits system to be much smaller, requiring smaller taxes? What is impossible is to pay low wages, low taxes and no benefits.

No business which depends for existence on paying less than 
living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.

By living wages I mean the wages of decent living - Franklin D. Roosevelt

There are 400 American billionaires because there are 45 million people living 

in poverty. Profit comes at the expense of the living wage. Corporate executives, 

university presidents, and capitalists in general are living the good life -- because 

so many others are living a life of hardship - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor