Low pay
Wage means payment for units of time or units of product as valued under a wage rate agreement. Today's most common unit is the hour. Many governments impose minimum wage rates upon employers to protect society. (e.g. Michigan's current minimum wage rate is: $890 per hour) However, many employers offer employees significantly higher wage rates. (e.g. Michigan's current median hourly rate for a Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA) is $1240 per hour)
Wages means ([L. remuneratio: cf. F. rémunération.] "Act or fact of remunerating"; "to give, present" an "advantage", "gift" or "reward" ) for services (or the quality thereof). In addition to receiving a wage, employees are often "put upon wages" to provide an employment advantage. These advantages may include such things as health and life insurance, paid vacation time, gifts for years of service, bonuses for high production rates and other employer provided benefits.
Payment by wage contrasts with salaried work, in which the employer pays an arranged amount at steady intervals (such as a week or month) regardless of hours worked, with commission which conditions pay on individual performance, and with compensation based on the performance of the company as a whole. Waged employees may also receive tips or gratuity paid directly by clients and employee benefits which are non-monetary forms of compensation. Since wage labour is the predominant form of work, the term "wage" sometimes refers to all forms (or all monetary forms) of employee compensation.
Wage labour involves the exchange of money for time spent at work (the latter quantity is termed labor power by Karl Marx and subsequent economists). As Moses I. Finley lays out the issue in The Ancient Economy:
The wage is the monetary measure corresponding to the standard units of working time (or to a standard amount of accomplished work, defined as a piece rate). The earliest such unit of time, still frequently used, is the day of work. The invention of clocks coincided with the elaborating of subdivisions of time for work, of which the hour became the most common, underlying the concept of an hourly wage.
...
Wikipedia