A closer look
President Franklin Roosevelt explicitly established the federal minimum wage during the Great Depression to guarantee that any working adult in the country could afford a decent standard of living, completely independent of their specific job title or skill level. He aggressively argued that any business depending on paying its workers less than a living wage literally had no fundamental right to exist in the United States economy. Fast forward a few decades, and modern corporate conglomerates have brilliantly convinced half the population that fast food workers and retail employees actually deserve to live in poverty because their essential labor is supposedly just meant for high school students looking for pocket change. It is a stunning bit of historical amnesia that allows massive companies to subsidize their miserable payrolls with government food stamps while simultaneously reporting record-breaking quarterly profits to their ecstatic shareholders on Wall Street
