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It's a hard problem. The flip side is, there's gotta be a way to talk about problems that exist today even if they're less severe than the ones in the past. When we talk about "medical malpractice" today, the bad treatment is typically much better than what you would have gotten 100 years ago, but I don't think that proves it's a bad term.

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It’s politics. The term was synthetically created to push a political agenda. The term was chosen to be as emotionally-charged as possible: “How can you be against paying people a Living Wage?”

We can and should talk about problems like this, but I hate that it is being done in such a nakedly political and disingenuous way.

What better term would you propose? I've seen "decent wage", "honest wage", and "fair wage", but they all have similar issues. I'm not sure there's any term that wouldn't become emotionally charged when used for the phenomenon of "some people are paid a lot less than I think they ought to be".

While the term "fair wage" is obviously something that's more "arguable" (e.g. what's fair?) it seems to me a less loaded phrase than "living wage," the alternative to which, on its face, seems to imply death.

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