I recently watched a fascinating documentary about Prohibition.
One of the reasons put forth by the drys was the concern about breadwinners drinking away their paychecks (to say nothing of coming home and beating their wives & families), leaving them to starve.
Now, I know that the Federal Minimum Wage is a recent (as in, post-Prohibition) thing, so my calculations may not be entirely based on reality, but…
Assuming I make federal minimum wage ($8.25/hr) and turn in a 40-hour workweek, that’s ~$330 before taxes; let’s assume $250 after taxes. In order for me to drink that away, I’d have to down 80+ craft microbrews, or 25+ shots of top shelf liquor. Drinking swill or rotgut would take twice as much. I can’t see how anyone could do it without dying of alcohol poisoning.
Of course, there was no minimum wage before Prohibition, and I have absolutely no clue what alcohol would have cost vis a vis a worker’s weekly wages back in those days. But in the days before Prohibition, was a breadwinner drinking his paycheck away just hyperbole, or could a worker really blow through his week’s wages in one night of drinking?
Because being an alcoholic isn’t just a one day a week job- plus for most people, spending even a quarter of your paycheck on alcohol is essentially drinking your paycheck away. I’d be evicted and my car would be repossessed if I did that.
Spending it on one night’s worth of drinking might be have been unlikely, but on one week’s (with a bar tab) worth of drinking would probably have been easy.
If I wanted to be a drunk I could blow $40 a night in bars on booze without even trying hard. That would be over a thousand bucks a month. If you’re on minimum wage or close to it, that bankrupts you.
Buy drinks, buy a round or two for your buds, then for the whole bar, end up at the track or poker game and blow big bux, or make other extravagant expenditures of the money that one wouldn’t have made if they weren’t drinking, and that can dissolve away the paycheck rather fast.
It’s not the US, but there are several passages in Angela’s Ashes about the struggles of Limerick women in the 1930s to intercept their husbands on the short journey between the workplace and the pub on payday, and descriptions of how little they had left for the week if they failed. It was a serious problem in Ireland at least (and for the McCourts, it was only piece work, meaning the problem was even more serious).
At the time, few jurisdictions had regulations that were strongly enforced about bars, and prostitution, gambli9ng and other “expenses” added to the costs. Additionally many people were ribbed or “rolled” while drunk.
The “drinking your paycheque” away senario probably didn’t happen to everyone, but the cost to the family budget, as mentioned in previous posts was very high. There were few if any social agencies, and those left destutute by drink faced a hard life indeed.
Not that prohibition helped. It has been widely accepted that prohibition led to the first formation of organised crime, ( cite : Organized Crime and the long term social costs of that are still with us.
One of the things you don’t consider is that drinking your paycheck away doesn’t mean you spend all of you paycheck on alcohol. It just means that you spend enough on alcohol that you have a problem paying the other bills. I make a good paycheck, but I am willing to bet that a couple hundred dollars spent in a month on beer at the wrong time, and I will miss a car payment.
Huh. Here in Chicago $4-$5 is about standard for a reasonable (craft brew) pint. The cheap beer at a bar is usually $2-$3, at least in my neighborhood. It’s not impossible to find $1.50 bottles.
You’re taking the original sentiment too literally. Drinking away one’s paycheck does not literally mean one’s entire paycheck is spent on alcohol. But when you have a wife who doesn’t work (because most women didn’t have jobs back then) and a couple kids at home, and your check has to support the entire family, any money spent on alcohol is money that could be taking clothing off your kids’ backs.
Gotta remember too, if someone worked at a factory or a mine, they literally “owed their soul to the company store.” Company store is gonna require payback FIRST THING.
Drunks love the company of other drunks. And they like to flash their money and buy drinks for others. Payday especially make some people feel rich enough to buy a round and then another, and then another.
When my husband first joined the Army in 1968, a recruit’s pay was meager. And after training, he said it was common to have guys come back to the barracks the weekend after payday (they got paid once a month then) with NO MONEY.
Typically, when they came back they were still extremely drunk, and often vomited. Puking up the paycheck made an impression on my husband, and he swore he was the only guy in uniform who NEVER drank.
The old family story that we heard growing up was that my great-grandfather worked in the coal mines in Illinois. He would get paid on Friday, and he’d stop in town on his way home. He’d finally crawl in the front door, stinking drunk, no money, and then beat Hell out of my great-grandmother. She got tired of this.
So, the next Friday when he repeated his actions, she waited until he finished beating on her and then he passed out on their bed. She took an iron skillet and beat HIM.
He came home promptly every Friday after that, turning his entire paycheck over to her.
~VOW
A quick search didn’t turn up an average wage for unskilled labor for that period, but the following information might be useful for comparison;
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union scale of wages for Chicago in 1920:
Bricklayer - $1.25/hr, avg. 44 hrs/wk
Painter - same
Plumber - same
Stonecutter- same
Typesetter - $0.98/hr, same hours
Also noted, from Wikipedia that in 1914, Henry Ford offered his auto-plant workers the then unheard-of wage of $5.00/day, equal to 110 of today’s dollars.
At a guess, it seems likely that unskilled day laborers might make 1/2 or less of these amounts.
SS
Anyhow, men would easily “drink” their paycheck away because they would also gamble and pay for prostitutes at the same time… in the bar they would frequent in.
The abuse women and children would suffer as a result of this behavior was presented by the documentary as grave, but it was way worse than any of us viewers can even begin to imagine.
So let’s say you’re one of Henry Ford’s $5.00 a day workers, and after your shift at the factory ends, you go out and have five beers at your local tavern (they were basically 8 oz. glasses) at 20 cents each. You’ve just drunk one-fifth of your paycheck. Of course, if you drink whiskey, you can probably double that.
Since you’re a hard-working guy, you’re probably going to do that nearly every night. Maybe losing 20%-40% isn’t literally “drinking your paycheck away” but it’s pretty damned close.
I suspect the beer prices at the WOrlds Fair are like the beer prices in Yankee Stadium or other closed venues, considerably above to usualy rate. Still, it doesn’t take much to drink away enough to make a difference. then there’s gambling.
The story I heard in one northern mining town in Canada was that when the company went to direct deposit for payroll, an awful lot of guys had to explain to their wives why they were getting so much more money now. It was not uncommon for someone to gamble away their paycheque while drunk on payday; plus bars were happy to cash paycheques fo the regulars - for a fee. Banks in Canada often closed before quitting time, meaning you had to rely on some business to cash your cheque.
The “perpetually broke drunk who beats wife and kids” is so old it’s almost cliche nowadays, but remember it was based on a pretty common situation - enough so that the busybodies around 1900 said “there oughta be a law” and worked very hard to create one.
Nitpick: Federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, not 8.25. HeyHomie, you’re quoting Illinois minimum wage, which is a whole dollar an hour higher where I am sitting, just across the Illinois/Indiana border.