Family Wage

Family Wage and Class

From the perspective of organized labor, which has historically argued for such things as an 8-hour workday, protections against child labor, guaranteed working safety standards, and other guarantees against exploitation of workers, the family wage holds a positive connotation. It represents a concept that can be rallied around and for which public support can be leveraged to resist employer attempts to pay workers at wages that are too low to live on. Public support for a family wage to some degree protects workers from employer attempts to lower wages. It also prevents families from having to send other members into the workforce—such as wives and sons and daughters—to earn the wages that the family needs to survive.

Family Wage and Gender

Family wage is predicated on what recent literature on the family has termed the standard North American family (SNAF)—a concept that includes a “standard” assumption of a two-parent, heterosexual, bread-winner-homemaker arrangement with children. As a result, critical analyses of gender and family have raised strong objections to the family wage. For one, it reinscribes or reinstitutionalizes and reaffirms a family model that relegates women to the domestic sphere of the home. Since the earliest days of the feminist movement, well before women's suffrage, feminist scholars have noted that relegating women to the sphere of the home and banning women from the wage-earning potential of the formal labor market is a recipe for disempowering women. This forces a woman to rely on a man for money and trust in his ability to earn and wisely conserve and or invest it. Research indicates that being recognized in the public sphere of the business or work world also brings with it self- and peer-esteem that, in conjunction with earning power, conveys a sense of authority within the household. When fathers are unemployed or employed with meager and or undependable salaries, families tend toward female-dominated and female-centered patterns. Men hold comparably little say about household matters—financial, parenting-related, or otherwise. At the opposite pole, when men are the sole earners, they tend to wield considerable authority and influence in the family, as the popularized terms “the man of the house” and “the man wears the pants in the family” connote. However, when women and men contribute roughly equal earnings to the household, the power dynamics within the family shift toward an egalitarian model.

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