Letter writer Robert C. Rassa claims that "the minimum wage was never intended as a 'living wage' ("A $15 minimum wage would have unintended consequences," Aug. 17).
But the truth is quite different. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking on behalf of the establishment of a national minimum wage in 1933, said that "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
A few years later FDR and the fist female secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, passed a minimum wage law that guaranteed 25 cents hour to workers.
That law, which passed before the establishment of the 40-hour work week, mostly affected male heads of households who worked Monday through Friday and a half day on Saturday.
FDR also warned: "Do not let at any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you you that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry."
The arguments for a living wage were right in FDR's time and they are still right today.
Robert Bedard, Baltimore