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Segment from Fair Wages

In the News

The hosts review the latest news about the minimum wage – from President Obama’s proposed federal increase, to state-level increases being debated across the country.

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BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Hello.

BRIAN: In the State of the Union Address this year, President Obama made the case for raising the minimum wage. If you are as devoted a fan of the bad pun as I am, you probably remember the set up.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Nick Chute is here today with his boss John Serrano. John is an owner of Punch Pizza in Minneapolis. And Nick helps make the dough, only now he makes more of it!

[LAUGHTER]

[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]

BRIAN: Obama explained that Serrano had raised his employees wages to $10 an hour. And the President urged other business owners to do the same. Two weeks later, the President signed an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour.

ED: Since then President Obama has called for a minimum wage hike for all workers. And while that’s unlikely to succeed in a face of Republican opposition, minimum wage increases are already happening at the state and local level. This week Connecticut became the latest state to raise its wage floor, and more than a dozen other states are expected to consider similar moves this year.

PETER: Proponents of these measures point to a recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office suggesting that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would lift nearly a million people out of poverty. Opponents argue that raising the minimum wage would kill jobs, about 500,000 of them according to the same CBO analysis. And there are broader questions at stake too. What counts as a fair wage, and whose job is it to make sure that American workers get one?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Today on the show we’re going to try to shed some light on the current debate by exploring how past generations have wrestled with this issue of fair compensation. We’ll look at the origins of minimum wage laws, and why it took so long for most Americans to be covered by them. We will also hear how seven factory owners took advantage of slave labor in the years before the Civil War, and what happened when mine owners turned to convict labor three decades later.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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Fair Wages Lesson Set

Note to teachers:

While examining tracts from Florence Kelley and Alice Henry, students will have the opportunity to practice historical empathy as they analyze the abhorrent working conditions working class women dealt with during the time period. In addition, they will explore how laws either kept those conditions in place, or how they failed to adequately address the needs of working class women in a complicated tangle of change and consequence. Students may use the political cartoon and images to investigate how race and class united and divided women on the issue of suffrage and protection laws. The Suffragist Movement was by no means a monolithic movement or one rooted in a singular cause. Though some of its results proved to help women, some unintended and unexpected consequences set women, and American workers overall, in a new direction. Together, these sources tie into the Backstory segment, “Equality or Fairness,” which is featured in the episode, “Fair Wages: A History of Getting Paid.”

 

American Slavery in the 19th Century

This lesson uses the “Slaves for Hire” segment. Submitted by Stephanie Kugler. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ndRUU7cMart8ZDD465ce2EAYWaPGfe7IoBmmDZkZQos/edit