The minimum wage: then and now
Currently, a bill has been passed in the U.S. House of Representatives to increase, in three steps over 26 months, the minimum wage from its present $5.15 per hour to $7.25, and now is before the Senate.
The minimum wage is a floor for all workers in the USA; however, some states have even higher minimums. But it was not always so. In the summer of 1942, when I was in my teens, I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers on a labor crew clearing land of brush and small trees on which an army camp (Camp Butner) was being built in North Carolina, 15 miles from my hometown. (I fibbed about my age to get the job; the time was only seven months after we went to war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and there was a big rush to get military installations built, so no one seemed to be very fussy about the age of needed workers.) The Federal minimum wage was then 40 cents per hour (with time-and-a-half over 40 hours a week), so, if I worked a full six-day week of 48 hours, I got $20.80 (before tax withholding). I couldn’t always get in 48 hours of work because of rain interruptions.
Apparently that 40 cents applied only to Federal workers (and possibly to large companies engaged in interstate commerce). So, when I went back to high school in the fall, I went to work in a J. C. Penney store, afternoons after school and on Saturdays, at 25 cents per hour; I later got a raise to 30 cents.
During the intervening years from that 25 cents an-hour job in 1942 to 2003 (my final year of doing part-time consulting work after I retired from full-time work in 1992) I did better: my hourly rate went to $115, a 45,900% increase, in nominal dollars, over the 25 cents.
The minimum wage is a floor for all workers in the USA; however, some states have even higher minimums. But it was not always so. In the summer of 1942, when I was in my teens, I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers on a labor crew clearing land of brush and small trees on which an army camp (Camp Butner) was being built in North Carolina, 15 miles from my hometown. (I fibbed about my age to get the job; the time was only seven months after we went to war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and there was a big rush to get military installations built, so no one seemed to be very fussy about the age of needed workers.) The Federal minimum wage was then 40 cents per hour (with time-and-a-half over 40 hours a week), so, if I worked a full six-day week of 48 hours, I got $20.80 (before tax withholding). I couldn’t always get in 48 hours of work because of rain interruptions.
Apparently that 40 cents applied only to Federal workers (and possibly to large companies engaged in interstate commerce). So, when I went back to high school in the fall, I went to work in a J. C. Penney store, afternoons after school and on Saturdays, at 25 cents per hour; I later got a raise to 30 cents.
During the intervening years from that 25 cents an-hour job in 1942 to 2003 (my final year of doing part-time consulting work after I retired from full-time work in 1992) I did better: my hourly rate went to $115, a 45,900% increase, in nominal dollars, over the 25 cents.
posted by Mycroft Watson at 6:05 PM
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