(host) The minimum wage is and has been since it was conceived and implemented in countries around the world starting in the 19th century.

Designed as a protection for employees to make sure, in theory, that they make wages commensurate with the cost of living, the minimum wage draws pretty passionate opinions from all corners, including those who want to see it raised, those who want to stay the same, and some who want it abolished altogether.

But when did this start, and why?

To start off today's episode, we should first ask ourselves: What is the minimum wage?

To answer this question, we're going to turn to our friends over at "Two Cen..

I'm Julia Lorenz Olson.

And I'm Philip Olson.

The minimum wage is the rate of pay set by the local or federal government, and it's designed to prevent people from being paid less than a certain rate.

Today, the minimum wage is extended to large swaths of employees across the U.S., although certain industries are excluded, such as workers who make tips, teenage trainees, some agricultural workers, and home care aides.

So now we have to ask: What existed before the minimum wage?

Well, just before minimum-wage laws started springing up around the world in the late 19th century, we see the rise of industrial factories with cramped living quarters, low pay, and harsh working conditions.

And these conditions existed because employers had little to no obligations to ensure the safety and security of their numerous employees.

want to force a seven-year-old to work in a factory all day?

No problem.

Want to cut an employee's salary in half to increase your own profits?

Go right ahead.

In their book, "Minimum Wage," economists David Neuwmark and William L. Wascher note that the minimum wage, which sprung up first in New Zealand and Australia in the 1890s, was initially geared towards protecting the labor of women and children, aligning what they made per hour with what was needed to survive.

And in 1890, there was a pretty wide gap between the average American's take-home pay of approximately $380 a year and the poverty line, which was set around $500 a year.

Employers decided what they felt was a fair wage for the labor performed by their employees and had a take-it- or-leave-it attitude that left many vulnerable workers out in the cold.

But it wouldn't be until 1938 that there was a nationwide minimum wage.

Okay, so, robber barons and big moguls weren't giving employees a fair shake in the latter half of the 19th century and into the early 20th century.

But the federal government still hadn't passed a successful minimum-wage law nationwide, and employees weren't taking things lying down.

So that leads us to our next question: How did labor movements impact the spread of the minimum wage to the federal level?

So, after the first minimum wages sprung up Down Under, the fair labor trend spread to other regions and countries such as the UK in 1909 and the U.S. passing the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.

But these didn't just pop up because the government and business owners suddenly had a change of heart, but rather because of ongoing agitation from workers and good old-fashioned strikes, sometimes through union organizing and sometimes through collective action that employees took without union protections because "strike" isn't just something you yell at the opposing team during a baseball game.

And some particularly important strikes that helped to shift labor laws in the U.S. were the Pullman Workers' Strike of 1894, where railroad workers in the Midwest rejected the Pullman company's decision to decrease their pay by 25% while keeping the cost of living, including rent and fees in the company-operated town of Pullman, the same.

The resulting fallout led President Cleveland and the Congress to establish Labor Day, and it was a group of Pullman workers in the 1920s who would go on to form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Then there was my favorite labor uprising that inspired a Broadway musical after "Evita," the Newsboy Strike of 1899.

But before I get busy saying "a five, six, seven, eight," I'll just add that these scrappy little imps inspired a huge blowback when they protested the rise in price per paper of the "Evening World" and "Evening Journal."

Newsboys were responsible for buying their own papers, which they then sold to make a profit, but they weren't refunded for unsold papers if they didn't manage to hawk their wares.

And the price hike was cutting into their already paper-thin margins since, at the time, the average newsboy only made a meager 26 cents a day.

And then there was the mill workers strike of Lawrence, Massachusetts, which shook the nation and came to be known colloquially as the Bread and Roses strike.

Led in large part by women and some men who were working at mills in the bustling immigrant hub, they led a strike in 1912 to stop working when their pay was summarily cut.

The national sentiment was on the side of the workers once images of mothers being dragged by their hair as they tried to send their young children out of the rising turmoil, alongside testimony from the children, started to circulate.

And as a result, President Taft sent the Attorney General to investigate the working conditions, and the striking workers received a 15% pay raise among other demands.

Neumark and Wascher noted that employers were seen as having an outsized amount of control over their workers, so the minimum wage was supposed to guarantee that employees can't arbitrarily be given substandard wages, especially in the lowest paid industries.

When the minimum wage first reached the U.S., it was at the state level starting in 1912 with Massachusetts.

And between 1913 and 1917, 11 more states passed laws that were centered around a minimum wage for women and children.

But at that point, men were still not covered.

The reason was that women and children weren't able to join unions so there was more attention to their need for government protections.

Okay, so strikers were striking even before they had those big blowup rats to put in front of businesses.

And the images of women and children on strike in particular proved effective in winning over public sentiment, especially since they were barred from the protections of unions and trade groups that were afforded to men.

And that leads us to our final question: When did the minimum wage go into effect nationwide?

Well, after all the bruhaha of the 19th century and early 20th century, there was an interest in codifying the salaries of workers.

And before there was a "fight for 15," there was the fight for 25... cents.

That's right.

When the Fair Labor Standards Act was finally passed in the U.S. in 1938, it set the minimum wage for eligible employees at 25 cents an hour.

But the FLSA also included laws about the working conditions and ages of children, fair pay for overtime, set the 40-hour work week-- oh, hey, weekend-- and added bookkeeping regulations for businesses.

And when it was first passed, the law covered about 20% of the labor force, but now it's applicable to over 80% of workers.

But the road for springing this act into action wasn't entirely smooth.

In Hammer v. Dagenhart in 1918, the Supreme Court overturned child labor laws, and Adkins v. Children's Hospital in 1923 had the Supreme Court rule against the District of Columbia's minimum wage requirements for women.

And FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which attempted to lower competition, put caps on the work week at 40 hours, limit the employment of young children, and encourage reemployment, was also thrown out as unconstitutional in 1935.

So, by the time the FLSA rolled around, there were a couple of things boiling under the surface-- a history of workers strikes and uprisings, other nations who had successfully passed minimum-wage laws and a history of labor laws in the U.S. being deemed unconstitutional in favor of the interests of big businesses.

But although there was uproar and pushback from industry executives and members of Congress who opposed the bill, President Roosevelt warned his listeners during one of his broadcast Fireside Chats, "Do not let any calamity-howling executive "with an income of $1,000 a day "tell you that a wage of $11 a week "is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry."

The bill was shepherded through Congress by Representative Mary Norton of New Jersey, who is the chairwoman of the House Labor Committee.

On June 25th, 1938, FDR signed the FLSA, sometimes known as a "wages and hours" bill, along with 120 other bills, all on the same day.

This was a way of kind of flooding the market with new laws to review and to prevent the bill from being overturned as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and it worked.

And over time, the protections of the minimum wage were viewed as beneficial to all workers and began to be extended to men and to the majority of employees.

But there's one piece of personal information you need to know, so, "Two Cents," take it away.

Since its first implementation, the U.S. federal minimum wage has been raised 22 times, but most recently in 2009 when it was raised to $7 and 25 cents.

But many states also set their own minimum wages, and it's a good thing for workers since even if the wage rate in your state doesn't match the federal minimum wage, employers are bound by law to pay you whichever one is the higher number.

So, how does it all add up?

Well, the minimum wage was first implemented in large part to protect specific employees in vulnerable industries from receiving low pay, but now it's extended to cover most employees nationwide.

And the implementation of the minimum wage wasn't the end of labor organizing across the U.S.

There was the Memphis Sanitation Workers strikes of 1968, the New York City Garbage Workers Strike of that same year, and the 1965 Farm Workers Strike, when the Farm Workers Association, led by Cesar Chavez, joined forces with a strike of Filipino workers in Delano's grape field.

So it seems that these legislative changes, which we now take as the norm, came about through consistent people power.

And battles over wages and equity are still raging on in discussions of gender discrimination and raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to a rate that gets closer to the cost of living nationwide, with some states and cities already getting the ball rolling.

But the issue remains contentious.