The significance of social movements: America's living wage movement

The relationship between social movements and social and political outcomes is an area of growing sociological research. Changes to public policy are frequently used by social movement researchers to analyse social movement impacts. This paper illustrates one of the problems associated with analysis based solely on public policy outcomes. Relying on secondary and interview data, this paper examines the outcomes of the American living wage movement in two areas-public policy and the wages of America's working poor. While the living wage movement has demonstrated a remarkable ability to influence public policy it has not been able to improve the wages of the working poor as much as one might expect from these achievements. An explanation for this is offered