Back before there were labor unions, children toiled in sweatshops and most everybody, regardless of age, worked 12 to 16 hours a day for pennies under the worst conditions imaginable. People lost limbs, their eyesight, and sometimes their very lives in dangerous jobs. No workers compensation, no disability benefits, nothing.

A century later, it’s mandatory for kids to stay in school. Overtime pay covers millions, though the Bush White House keeps pushing rules to exempt more and more of the nation’s workers from overtime pay. There’s workers’ compensation for those hurt on the job, though it can take months, even years, to resolve cases.

Oh, and the nation’s minimum wage is now a whopping $5.15 an hour.

This is progress?

Compared to the world’s developed nations, hardly. The United States is far behind all the others when it comes to ensuring that the minimum wage is a living wage. America may be the leader of the Free World, but, for millions of its workers who clean hotel rooms and offices every night, toss fast-food burgers or sell clothes at hoity-toity shops, the minimum wage amounts to slave wages.

You can’t house, feed and clothe a family on five bucks an hour. Or six or seven. Much less provide health insurance or save to buy a home if you earn that little.

The free-marketers say government has no business dictating a minimum wage. Let competition — supply and demand — determine a worker’s value, they maintain.

Industrialists used the same arguments to fight a 40-hour workweek, overtime pay, minimum-wage laws, worker-safety rules and virtually any government oversight. It’s no coincidence that, at the height of the nation’s labor movement, in the 1950s, this nation’s economy was pumped, thanks to government-financed education and home-buying benefits for veterans of World War II. And thanks, too, to the labor unions that kept pushing for fair wages that generated both a higher standard of living for workers and generous, but not outrageous, profits for businesses.

We now live in the age of outrageous inequities — executive pay jumped 571 percent during the 1990s while the average worker’s pay rose only 37 percent nationally. In Central Florida, workers’ pay nudged up only 34 percent during that time.

The gap between rich and poor is widening, yet the safety net for Americans is narrowing, and the middle class keeps getting squeezed.

It’s no wonder so many people must work two or three jobs in Orlando’s service-oriented economy that gobbles up thousands of “unskilled” workers for the hospitality, theme-park and retail sectors. America ranks high in productivity, but the social costs have been tremendous on our children.

Neglected, abused, turning to crime — too many kids continue to fall through the cracks. Our services-based economy won’t allow for family values.

With or without unions, Americans at all levels are starting to speak up for a living wage. They see the issue for what it is: a matter of fairness and not some communist plot to destroy America’s free-enterprise system.

Orlando is the latest city to pass a living-wage law for city employees and contractors who do work for the city. By Central Florida standards, it was a pretty gutsy move, though the new law falls short of most living-wage laws across the country because it does not factor annual inflation or include health-care insurance for certain employees.

It’s still a good start. If you support family values, a living wage should be a moral imperative.