On that front, one of the worst offenders is the minimum wage law.
As the AP notes, Congress passed the first minimum wage law in 1938 and has voted for raises since, but has never linked it to inflation.
Here is a suggestion for a smart minimum wage law (perhaps proposed in return for relaxing federal healthcare taxes and mandates for small business?): A minimum wage rise that is triggered by stipulated economic conditions, much like the Fed says it will let interest rates seek market levels only when unemployment drops to 6.5%.
If there had never been a minimum-wage law passed -- if, as in the years before 1938, Americans today could be paid as little as employers could get away with -- and if, in 2013, someone in Congress proposed the first law ever that would guarantee workers a minimum wage.
The federal minimum-wage law has always served a symbolic purpose beyond setting a specific number.
Republicans in Michigan's state assembly were so worried that a proposed ballot initiative would boost Democratic turnout that they dropped their resistance to the idea and passed their own law raising the minimum wage.
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It alleged that his stipend, compared with the hours he worked, fell short of minimum wage standards under the FLSA and New York state law.
This can be a hard pill for neoclassical economists and those who think like them to swallow, but it helps if you think of the minimum wage as it really is: a minimum productivity law.
"In every state except Mississippi, the combination of welfare and food stamp benefits is already high enough that someone in workfare working 20 hours a week as required by the welfare law would already be receiving the minimum wage or better, " he said.
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Knowing financial markets might tumble on the news, the Senate reassured them by approving a much-needed new bankruptcy law on the same day as the minimum-wage vote.
But the United States was built by workers who were guaranteed no minimum wage -- in a country that, until the 1938 law, let the marketplace determine how much anyone was paid.
To the point that my idea that the personal allowance for income tax should be set, by law, at the full year full time minimum wage earnings will be in the manifestos of at least two political parties (likely, those who will come third and fourth, but you cannot have everything) at the next general election.
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"However, the government needs to do more to enforce the minimum wage in workplaces and get tough on rogue employers who break the law, and there are still concerns on the implications of recent changes to the Commission's remit, " he said.
Under federal law, every employee in America is entitled to a minimum wage, additional compensation for overtime and certain other benefits.
The law mandated a minimum 25-cent-per-hour wage, in addition to setting the maximum amount of hours most employees could work per week at 44.
Under Labour, Britain will finally sign up to what is called the "Social Chapter, " a section of EU law affecting workers rights, giving them more protection, including a guaranteed minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage was last increased in 2009 as part of a three-step phase-in that became law in 2007.
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