For minimum wage workers that'd be almost 14 hours of labor in the US (maybe more since they still have to pay the payroll taxes like SS). Given that many of those jobs aren't full-time, that could be 2-4 days of labor for many of those workers. If I'm reading [1] correctly, some 30% of the population earned income at the equivalent of full-time minimum wage income ($15,080) or less. So not most, but certainly a significant number.

And working some more numbers, $100 in a day (full-time shift of 8 hours) would be $12.50/hour. Which works out to $26,000/year. About 48% of individuals earned less than that in that year.

Yet Another Edit (YAE): At $26k/year a single individual with no dependents wouldn't actually be making $100/day. Like the poorer minimum-wage earners, they'd be losing SS and Medicare taxes. At that income they're also paying income tax and not (necessarily) getting it all back (like the minimum-wage earners would). If my brain engages I'll work the numbers for a single individual to actually get to bring home $100/day (ignoring state income taxes).

Note: I'm tired, may be misreading the intro block to the table, but this doesn't seem to be including the unemployed or those under the age of 15 and only those who report income (so those getting paid under the table aren't affecting the percentages).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

Alright. This also seems more in-line with the type of work the people involved in the study were doing (episodic). Thanks for the perspective.

The median income in the US is $50,000. The average work week is 34.5 hours (per the OECD), or upwards of 40 according to other sources. $25 per hour is a reasonable baseline for the US average. So it's about four hours of work. The average tax rate is 18%, so it's more like 4.8 hours of work including taxes.

That's the household median. When you combine/compare the data in [1] and [2] that median makes sense when you consider two income households. The individual median is around half that value (fits in the $25,000-27,999 bracket somewhere, assuming a uniform distribution across that range it'd be around $26,500).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

For most people for the whole EU, probably. For most people in every country, not really. Here in Portugal, $100 is about three days of an average wage (50th percentile, after taxes).