Introduction: the challenge of a living wage

This book addresses one important way of dealing with minimum claims to justice through decent minimum or living wages. These claims have come at a time when widening inequalities have become an unavoidable fact (Nolan and Valenzuela 2019), one made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis that started in 2020. Even before then, the steady flow of reports documenting rising inequality in the rich ‘liberal’ world, coming from reputable and technically minded agencies, was not surprising, given that a decades-long push to return to ‘business rule’ in the economy and the labour market was designed to expand the profit share. As French social scientist Thomas Piketty (2013) has persuasively shown in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century , the concentration of wealth and its tendency to produce higher returns than the general growth rate mean that the present century risks seeing rising income and wealth inequality, a problem only reversed after World War Two with massive government intervention (see also Cassidy 2014). The countries that form the particular focus of this book are the six English-speaking ‘liberal’ welfare states of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They form a distinct cluster in analyses of welfare states and work relations, and although there are important differences between these countries and their politics and policies, they have followed policies antithetical to the remedies for runaway inequality that Piketty has identified. The consequences have been widening inequality, particularly in the UK and the US (Piketty 2013, Figure 9.2). These two countries have been completely transformed by rising inequality. High and rising inequality causes social and political malaise, evident in crime, mistrust, unhealthy individualism, and deteriorating public health (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). These problems are mostly worse in the Englishspeaking cluster among the rich democracies, with the US and the UK ranking first and third on Wilkinson and Pickett's (2009, Figure 1, p 497) widely referenced indicators. Apart from generally lean welfare systems, these countries have all institutionalised pro-employer labour markets, with policy deliberately pushing their populations to depend on overextended labour markets. This dependence is further promoted by sociological processes common to many countries as inequalities related to gender and employment change.

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