n of stock holder profits may not be the primary goal of the firm.
The advent of labor unions in the United States brought in coordinated efforts to change and improve, from the perspective of workers, wage levels, working conditions, employment
4R. Baxter, Contemporary Economics (Hardmonsworth, Eng land: Penguin Books, 1989), 140.
security, and so forth. Labor unions sought their goals through the process of collective bargaining. Soon after the initial successes of the labor unions, some groups in society, supported by organized labor sought to establish minimum wage rate standards in the United States. The national minimum wage was sought through a process of legislating the minimum wage level.
The first national minimum wage was legislated in the United States by the Congress in 1938, and the act was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt. From the initial debate on the minimum wage law in the late 1930s through furor in 1990 concerning raising the level of the national minimum wage, the arguments against a minimum wage, and the arguments against raising the level of the minimum wage have not changed by as much as one comma. In 1938, the Republican caucus in Congress claimed that the new 25 cent per hour minimum wage would (1) bankrupt small businesses, (2) increase unemployment among the class of workers it was intend
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