A family wage is a wage that is sufficient to raise a family. This contrasts with a living wage, which is generally taken to mean a wage sufficient for a single individual to live on, but not necessarily sufficient to also support a family.
The term "family wage jobs" has occasional contemporary use in American political rhetoric and is most associated with Catholic intellectuals, in the Catholic social teaching tradition, such as Douglas Kmiec and Allan C. Carlson. Charles Krauthammer has said there should be a two-tiered system where breadwinners have a higher minimum wage.[1]
A family wage – a basic wage, with a supplement by family size, was adopted by the dominant trade union in the British Mandate of Palestine (now the state of Israel), Histadrut, in 1923, and remained policy for a decade, but implementation was limited.[2]
In the United Kingdom, a family wage was a demand of male labour unionists at the turn of the 19th century.[3]
