They had been forced to pay $500 security deposits on being hired, and then had their wages docked to pay for things like equipment, uniforms, promotional campaigns and revenue lost when customers' checks bounced.
To come up with his findings, Dube analyzed 23 years' worth of data on past minimum wage increases, controlling for things like regional differences.
The remarkable fact is that, even though the earth's population has more than trebled in a century, the best measure of the scarcity of resources price has fallen virtually throughout that time for just about everything extracted from or grown in the earth, yet has risen, in the form of wages, for the one thing that has become far more abundant: people.
He's a paradoxical kind of vanguardist: he dearly wants to wage revolution, but only for things that are already popular, and it makes little difference what they are so long as he's the one leading the charge.
She says that students can expect to earn anything from £6.08 (minimum wage) to around £8.50 an hour for things like high level admin work.
As for wages – well, if things had turned out as planned, average earnings would be almost £2,000 higher.
They had their "Six for '06" platform that called for things like more student loans and a hike in the minimum wage.
Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers.
CLEORA REBER Roseville, Calif., March 4 * To the Editor: In the column, Professor Romer says that many of her students "assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers".
That would result in different wages for workers at different firms, which is one thing unions generally don't want.
