ABSTRACT
At the end of the twentieth century and in the beginning of the twenty-first, the quest for living wages and equal wages has once again been reconfigured. Movements for living wages have broadened their constituency, incorporating workers initially left out of minimum wage legislation. Similarly, the fight for equal wages, initially settling for a narrow conception of equal pay for equal work, returned to a broader definition of equal pay for work of equal value. Both of these revived movements have at their very center the people who have been left behind in the wage regulations we have discussed so far: people in female-dominated and minority-concentrated jobs. These two precepts, living wages and equal wages, have become increasingly intertwined. Further, the debate about these issues indicates widespread (but by no means universal) acceptance of the idea that women as well as men support dependents. More than seventy years after the Women’s Bureau attempted to expand the concept of breadwinner to include women, the new living wage movement is centered around the need for a gender-neutral family-sustaining wage.
