Measured Against the Family

On Sunday, Amazon’s new minimum starting wage for full-time core operations employees in the United States took effect: $20 an hour, a $1 raise the company calls an investment of more than $1.5 billion. It’s a real raise. This issue asks the question the Church puts to every wage, generous ones included: can a family live on it, and how would you know?

The Principle

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church opens its treatment of pay by ranking it: “Remuneration is the most important means for achieving justice in work relationships.” A few lines on, it states the claim this whole issue rests on. “The simple agreement between employee and employer with regard to the amount of pay to be received is not sufficient for the agreed-upon salary to qualify as a ‘just wage’, because a just wage ‘must not be below the level of subsistence’ of the worker: natural justice precedes and is above the freedom of the contract.”1 Everything hangs on that last clause. A wage is a contract, and the contract answers to a justice older than itself.

The Compendium is compressing Leo XIII, whose route to the same principle is worth walking, because he gave the other argument a fair hearing in his analysis. In Rerum Novarum he sets out the free-contract view in its own words: “Wages, as we are told, are regulated by free consent, and therefore the employer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has done his part.” Then he answers it by separating two facts about work. Taken only as his own personal act, Leo grants, a workman would be free “to accept a small wage or even none at all.” But work is also how he stays alive, and “these two aspects of his work are separable in thought, but not in reality.” A man who has to work to eat is bargaining under pressure. So a contract can be freely signed and still unjust, and a worker who takes harder terms out of necessity or fear, Leo says, “is made the victim of force and injustice.”2

Where does the floor sit? Leo sets it first at the individual worker, then a paragraph later widens it to the household: “If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift.”3 So the family wage keeps a house fed and leaves enough over that a working family can save and, in time, own something. The Compendium says the same a century later: a family wage “must also allow for savings that will permit the acquisition of property as a guarantee of freedom.”4

In 1981, John Paul II turned the principle into a test. He wrote in Laborem Exercens that “a just wage is the concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole socioeconomic system,” and that this test “concerns above all the family.” Just pay for an adult responsible for a family “will suffice for establishing and properly maintaining a family and for providing security for its future.” He names two ways to get there: a single family wage paid to the worker, or “other social measures such as family allowances.”5 That second route matters: the teaching fixes the family’s need as the measure and leaves real room to argue over who meets it.

The Catechism keeps both sides of the ledger in one sentence, “In determining fair pay both the needs and the contributions of each person must be taken into account,” and then shuts the free-contract door: “Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages.”6 In May, Leo XIV restated John Paul II’s test in Magnifica Humanitas and gave it an edge. Fair wages, he writes, “reveal whether the worker is treated as a person or merely as a cost of production.”7 The teaching is Leo XIII’s. What Leo XIV adds is a question short enough to carry into any conversation about pay.

Be clear about the weight. That a just wage must support the worker and his family is ordinary magisterium, taught without a break from 1891 to this year. What dollar figure meets it in a given county, and how much of a shortfall falls to the employer and how much to the wider community, are prudential judgments on which faithful Catholics disagree in good faith.

More on this principle: Work and the Worker. All twelve principles.