This summer, debate raged in Washington, D.C. on increasing the United States’ minimum wage. Amid the policy debates, many corporations, like CVS and Starbucks, independently increased their baseline hourly pay. And while legislators and lobbyists jockey around numbers — $12, $13.50, $15 — one math equation they aren’t considering is how paying workers daily versus every one or two weeks could improve millions of lives.
The idea of paying workers each day isn’t new. In fact, it’s thousands of years old. In the Neolithic Revolution (10,000 – 6,000 BC), workers were compensated with daily rations of beer, bread, grain, meat and cloth. Historians discovered that the first payrolls were inscribed on clay tablets, which tracked these daily “beer salaries.” Fast forward to Biblical times where it says in Deuteronomy 24:15, “Pay them their wages each day before sunset… [or]… you will be guilty of sin.”
