Fair Wages: A History of Getting Paid

This episode of Backstory looks at the origins of the minimum wage, and explores how we've thought about fair pay over time. Along with their guests, the American History Guys Ed Ayers, Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf discuss how slaves in the antebellum period could sometimes be brought into the wage economy, and how convict labor played havoc with wages in the wake of the Civil War. They discover why early 20th century feminists cheered the demise of state minimum wage legislation in the 1920s, and find out how the federal minimum wage came to be, a decade later. The Sound of Ideas returns Tuesday.